228 thoughts on “Debate Open Thread”

  3. I am stuck without being able to watch this can any of you give me a sense of what is going on?
    (btw hilzoy–you rock!)

  6. I may be biassed. But: it’s pretty testy. Clinton seems to me to be off somehow. She went on this thing about how odd she finds it that she always gets the first question. She seems sort of desperate to me.

  8. thanks hilzoy I trust your analysis and since I cant watch I appreciate anything you have to say about what is going on. I was wondering which Hillary would show up tonight, and hoped Obama would stay cool

  10. Um, so can we say that the “go out with class” meme is dead, this is some bitter sarcastic stuff here!

  14. Obama’s best debate by far. Strong and presidential. Hilary is somehow “off”; perhaps a little desperate.

  15. She’s not going to win by talking over everybody and jousting with the moderators. That is exactly what people dislike about HRC. It’s in part sexist, I know. But it is what it is.
    Why on earth would a candidate complain about getting the questions first?
    And why didn’t Obama step up by offering to take the questions first, if she’d prefer it?

  16. I thought you weren’t watching, hilzoy? šŸ™‚ I thought the whole health care debate was pretty painful.
    I think Josh Marshall’s characterization of Timmy Boy was right: “What if we partly withdrew and then the Iraqis told us to completely withdraw and then al Qaida was elected president and then they allied with North Korea, do you have a policy ready for that!?!?!?!” He’s driving me nuts.
    Heh. “Sounds good.” This should be interesting.

  19. to all of you posting comments I just wanted to thank you, being unable to watch it is great to hear all of your impressions

  20. Before break, she spent a while trying to keep talking over the moderators. It was painful.
    The real blow so far: Clinton said “after O. got into the Senate, our voting records were the same.” Obama replied: “once you drive the bus into the ditch, there are only so many ways to get out of it. But you have to ask who voted to drive the truck into the ditch in the first place.”

  21. Russert’s questions beg the question in irritating ways. “If Al Qaeda sets up base in Iraq, would you reserve the right to invade?”
    Why on earth would we presume that invading would be the appropriate response to an Al Qaeda? How about just bombing their base like Clinton did in 1998, if I remember right? Duh. But ya see, the question doesn’t have any teeth to it unless Russert makes the presupposition.
    A “yes” answer is supposed to make you look silly and ineffective. A “no” answer is supposed you look like a coward.
    I’m all for tough questions and pegging down candidates but not when the questions are tough in the way that “When did you stop beating your wife?” is tough.

  22. Clinton: words not enough; we need a fighter on health care.
    Obama: about 1993, I think that there were a number of reasons why health care failed, but one of them was that Senator Clinton thought that all you had to do was fight. (Or something like that.)

  24. MSNBC.com’s feed is *horrendous*… CNN.com has always been smooth as silk, but MSNBC’s offering is a slide-show.
    Perhaps more than just hilzoy are tuning in tonight? Anyway, I’m glad people are posting comments… since I think you are beating the buffering at this point.

  29. Obama: vague answer on campaign finance and public money.
    Clinton: says she will release tax returns when she has been nominee, “maybe before”. (I actually think this is a very big deal: I want to know what’s in there before the convention. Well before.)
    Question for Obama on Farrakhan. O: I did not seek his support; have condemned his antisemitic remarks, etc. Russert: will you reject his support? O: I can’t tell someone he can’t say I’m a good guy. But condemn stuff he’s said.

  34. Okay, what Russert is doing is sleazy not just to Obama, but more so to Jews.
    How dare he start dragging up hateful things said by someone two steps removed from the candidate to conduct a smear attack? Obama answers the question, but that’s not enough. Then Russert has to try to quote the particular hateful things Farrakhan said.
    And then ask an unanswerable question, something like: “Given these statements, how can you reassure Jews?”
    I wish the audience would start booing Russert.

  35. Gee, Clinton is trying to out-denounce Obama. Impressive. She can denounce harder, you know.
    Wait, Obama can reject and denounce.
    Can they both do it while rubbing their stomach and patting their head?
    My vote depends on the answer!

  38. This is easily HRCs worst performance. She attacks on rejecting versus renouncing, and he manages to make her attacks look silly, strained, and childish.

  39. I like the way Obama has made explaining policy essential to his answer about being allegedly “more liberal than Ted Kennedy.” Good answer, I thought.
    Segued into boilerplate, though.

  40. Frankly I think this a fal debate preview in a way, I imagine Mccain (from what I saw in the GOP debates) will be even easier to fluster than HRC was.

  42. Question to Obama: what question does HRC have to answer to prove she’s worthy of being nominee? He says she’s worthy, and doesn’t have anything more to prove.

  45. Yeah, darn straight, Hilzoy. Obama has a kind of virtuosic cool. It’s almost a pleasure to watch, as a kind of performance.

  46. This was an awful debate.
    The last three CNN debates, which were the only debates I watched prior to this one, were good because the moderators mostly stepped back (even Wolf Blitzer!) and let the candidates mostly go at it with each other.
    This debate was mostly just the moderators asking questions separately to each candidate. an F to NBC, and especially Tim Russert, who beyond that was just disgusting with the Farrakhan thing.

  47. Russert was disgusting tonight. Someone needs to organize a response to NBC. He needs to be censured. Completely unacceptable.

  48. Obama/Clinton over Russert/Williams in a landslide.
    Good lord, that was horrible. I never thought I’d be looking back fondly at John King’s moderation. Wow.

  50. John King and Campbell Brown were actually great by comparison. With Russert (and Williams, to a lesser extent) it always has to be all about them.

  51. Gee, guys….tell us what you think of the moderators…

    Question to Obama: what question does HRC have to answer to prove she’s worthy of being nominee? He says she’s worthy, and doesn’t have anything more to prove.

    Hm. Kind of hard for her to attack him on this…
    (But really kind of predictable…was pretty obvious that Obama could be that gracious in his sleep….)

  52. What a boring debate. I’ve watched the last seven, I can’t watch anymore.
    Russert disappointed me! The Farrakhan question riles me so much!
    I think he answered the ridiculous question the best he can: he laughed at it. Denounce and move ON.

  53. Hmm. I thought Obama’s answer to Farrakhan was actually good — asking candidates to “denounce” every nutcase who supports them is ridiculous, not least of all because it gives windbags like Farrakan too much credit when the proper way to deal with them is to ignore them.
    The alternative is to let them control the discourse by reacting to their histrionics like they’re credible — which leads to people like Russert injecting them into debates where they shouldn’t even be acknowledged in the first place. Obama didn’t hedge on that question at all.
    Seriously, if Tim Russert asks, “Do you support Vladimir Zhirinovsky?” do you launch into a detailed denunciation of his Take Back Alaska And Wash The Blood Off Our Boots In The Indian Ocean platform, or just say, “No”? You say No and move on. (I guess if you’re CNN, you could hire him as a pundit. But they had to counter the tidal force that is Tim Russert somehow.)

  54. I concur on the closing questions: what I came away with was BHO’s grace and HRC’s repeated use of “I.” I don’t like her and don’t want her to be the nominee, but she fought a good fight (mostly) and I hope she can show some of the grace BHO demonstrated this evening.
    Otherwise, this was largely a waste of time, probably because the issues have been so thoroughly hashed over that there’s nothing left but inane Russert hypotheticals. Ugh.

  56. Clinton quote: ā€˜I will fix NAFTAā€™; Clinton solution:
    1. Environmental Controls
    2. Enforceability
    Obama: ā€˜I want to be an advocate on behalf of workers.ā€™; Obama solution:
    1. Labor Standards
    2. Environmental Standards
    3. Safety Standards
    Andrea Mitchell: ā€œThey took a hard line on NAFTA.ā€
    Translation: We will do nothing to stop the outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs other than tell the Mexicans to establish environmental programs and an EEOC.
    Mexico will do neither and these two know it. Manufacturers will continue to move south where they can pay $1/hr with no benefits. Andrea Mitchell is either stupid or corrupt.

  57. I think the thing that always startles me with Russert is how belligerent he is when faced with Dems.
    After wwatching him preen and posture with his Republican guests every week, it always surprises me what a jerk he is.
    Before the debate he told a lie.
    He said that no one had ever questioned her toughness. Except of course for all of them questioning whether she was tough enough to be president when a tear welled up prior to New Hampshire.
    Timmeh’s pants did not burst into flame, but I feel they would have were there any justice for corporate propagandists.

  58. I can’t decide which was the worst question Russert asked this evening. I think it comes down to either the hypothetical he asked Clinton, “If we withdraw from Iraq, and al Qaeda injects steroids into Roger Clemens’ ass, would you invade Canada?” or his offensive question to Obama, “Since your cousin once picked up a pamphlet from Louis Farrakhan, does that mean you want to kill all the Jews?”

  59. Q: ā€œWhat do you make of Dmitry Medvedev?ā€
    A: ā€œWe need to make our commitment to human rights more apparent to the Russians.ā€
    Q: ā€œIf the Russians go into Kosovo, what do you do?ā€
    A: ā€œWork with our international partners.ā€
    I think there is a good chance that the Serbians, backed by Moscow, will retake Kosovo by force before the Democratic Convention. Europeans are learning to hate the EU (our main ā€˜international partnerā€™) and are growing wary of the religious enclaves who shall remain nameless growing in their Cities.
    The Europeans would not oppose Russia and the US would not want to start a third hot front, especially with the Russians. Because of this, the Russian rules of engagement would be loose and the conflict would very likely be horrible. The talking heads will make comparisons with World War One. A Kosovo conflict would open peopleā€™s eyes to the true nature of warfare and scare many. Neither Hillary nor Obama has a strong executive background and they both look pretty weak as a prospective Commander in Chief.
    That is why Al Gore is the most likely Democratic candidate in 2008.

  61. “Europeans are learning to hate the EU”
    Yes, their living standards, level of political freedom, and and the accompanying widespread discontent has them on the verge of revolution.
    Care to give any cites on this?
    “A Kosovo conflict would open peopleā€™s eyes to the true nature of warfare”
    Unlike Chechnya.
    “That is why Al Gore is the most likely Democratic candidate in 2008.”
    I have to say that your predictive powers, and analytic accuracy, are consistently amazing.

  62. I think there is a good chance that the Serbians, backed by Moscow, will retake Kosovo by force before the Democratic Convention. Europeans are learning to hate the EU (our main ā€˜international partnerā€™) and are growing wary of the religious enclaves who shall remain nameless growing in their Cities.
    Um, what?
    Who’s “growing wary of the religious enclaves who shall remain nameless growing in their Cities”? Why don’t you just come right out and say “Europeans are afraid of the Muslims”? That is what you’re talking about, right?
    This comment is both clueless and disgusting.

  63. This comment is both clueless and disgusting.

    What do you expect of someone who thinks you have to emulate the “enemy” to beat them.

  64. ā€œWill not take PAC money.ā€;
    ā€œDoesnā€™t help if you are taking millions of dollars from special interests.ā€
    Here’s another prediction Gary:
    Names to remember: Auchi (Iraq), General Mediterranean Holding (Luxembourg), AR Pizza (Chicago), Fintrade Services SA (Panama), and donā€™t ever forget Rezko (Syria).
    “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate.”
    I predict that a bigger garden was Michelleā€™s idea.

  67. My observations:
    It struck me as a very even debate, with Obama looking slightly better, which in the context of the current campaign is fine for him and not so good for her. In general I thought that Obama played a fairly defensive game plan and succeeded – he seemed to be very good in this debate at limiting damage by conceding points to Hillary without looking weak (metaphorically making her kick field goals instead of giving up touchdowns), while making the most of his chances to keep making her pay for her AUMF vote again and again, such that all roads led to Iraq, on foreign policy, experience, and judgment questions.
    The more nasty tone of the dueling speeches and campaign mailers which has occurred just in the last several days since the Austin debate, as well as fatigue on the part of both candidates had a small but subtle effect on this debate, which was never very directly negative but had a pinched and rather tired feel to it, especially coming from Hillary.
    Depending on your point of view, Hillary seemed either peevish and sarcastic (con), or tough and aggressive (pro), while Obama seemed either cool and unflappable (pro), or aloof and reserved (con).
    Hillary seems to have picked health care as the metaphorical hill that she has chosen to die on. She passed up an early chance to accuse the Obama campaign of hypocrisy on the subject of honest and positive messaging (one of Obama’s strengths up to this point) with regard to the flyers circulated by his campaign in Ohio this week, and instead went straight into health care.
    I think this was a tactical mistake on her part – the resulting 16 minute slog over health care mandates felt like a draw, when she might have been able to score some negative points against him on campaign tone and knock down some of his positives with voters. Perhaps the Clinton campaign has decided to try to emphasize her strength on health care rather than trying to tear down Obama on his campaign style as a concession to Democratic unity, or maybe she felt the need to be more indirect in her attacks in the 1-1 debate format (vs. stump speeches).
    The idiot questions from the moderators didn’t bother me as much as they seem to have bothered some other posters here. I saw them as an audition for how the candidates would have to field questions from a WH press corps that is just as idiotic, not to mention the debates in the general election with McCain.
    I thought both of them did pretty well, except for the “hah ha! betcha can’t name the leading candidate for President of Russia!” question from Russert. On that gotcha question I thought they both looked pretty bad – Hillary gave an “I’ll tell you every thing I can think of that is distantly related to the topic, and hope you don’t notice that I don’t actually know the answer to the question as posed” response, while Obama’s response was an elaborate version of “what she said” that made him look like a student caught in class peeking at his neighbor’s test. Not impressive.
    If one of them turns in a performance like that in the general election debates against McCain it will look bad. They’d better study up on foreign affairs and memorize the names of lots of foreign leaders (and their food preferences, their regional capitals, the names of their currencies, their favorite postage stamps, etc., etc.)
    Other than that, Obama seemed much better on foreign policy questions than Hillary did. His detailed riposte on her “you said you would bomb Pakistan” line was very sharp, using the imprecision of her language vs. what he had actually said to turn an attack on him into points scored against her. He also handled several awkward moments gracefully, such as the way he reacted to the video clips of Hillary mocking him. Very Reagan-esque.
    I liked the way Obama reacted to the Farrakhan question. At first it looked like he was going to squirm, that it put him in a tough spot, and then it seemed like he made an on the spot decision to go ahead and unequivocally throw Farrakhan under the bus, rather than try to fudge a have-it-both-ways answer. It seemed like he was actually thinking about how to handle the question, and then making a decision right then, rather than going over ground which had been prepared for and practiced for before hand.
    When Hillary came back with that Reject vs. Denounce distinction on Farrakhan I almost expected him to say to her “what more do you want me to do, go over to his house and throw rocks through the window?”. Hillary’s counter statement about her experience in her NY Senate campaign standing up against an anti-Semitic group was lame, lame, lame.
    Standing up against anti-Semitism in New-freaking-York is not exactly a profile in courage, but she tried to tell it like it was some sort of stand on principle. A stand on principle would be to denounce Israel in a NY primary, not the other way around. Give me a break. This is one of the things that from time to time really sours me on the Clinton campaign – not all the time, but every now and then they say something which sounds like they just plain think I’m too stupid to not see through them. Spinning is one thing, insulting my intelligence is another, and I wish they would just stop doing it already.
    OK, now for a rant:
    The thing that struck me the most about this debate was what was not discussed. The Economy. The housing market meltdown was not mentioned in any serious way, despite the fact that Cleveland is one of the epicenters of the subprime debacle. There was no talk about the economy at all really, except for skirmishing over the details of how to revise NAFTA.
    From listening to this debate, you would never know that we are already in a recession, that a mini-depression is a distinct possibility, and that we are facing a deflationary spiral that depending on who you will believe will take us either in the direction of late 1970’s stagflation or be a replay of 1990’s Japan at best. This is the giant Pink Elephant in the living room that nobody wants to talk about right now, because it does not match up with the narrative of any campaign.
    Obama does not want to talk about economic doom because it contradicts his message of hope and empowerment. Hillary wants to give people the impression that if she is elected we will jump into a time machine and go back to the economy of 1994 (only this time we all get to cash out those dot-com stock options before the bust). McCain doesn’t want to talk about the economy because the GOP owns this recession to a large degree. Nobody wants to talk about the freaking economy.
    This ticks me off, because the next Presidential administration will be totally dominated by the economy and fiscal policy issues. Other issues will be pushed out of the way, whether we like it or not, because there won’t be any money left to pay for anything. I would sort of like to have a debate over the single biggest issue of the next four years, instead of a bunch of other stuff which would really matter if we lived in an alternative universe where the dollar isn’t dropping like a stone, our access to foreign capital isn’t drying up, interest payments (at soon to be rapidly rising rates) aren’t eating the federal budget alive, the middle class isn’t effectively bankrupt (now that their HELOCs are being turned off), and we won’t be able to afford either one of an extended war in the Middle East or a mandated health care program because our entire country is going, or already has gone, flat dead broke.
    If somebody can send me a bus ticket to the alternative reality where none of that stuff is actually happening, I would really appreciate it. In lieu of that, I would really appreciate a debate that actually addresses the more sucky reality I’m currently stranded in.
    /end rant.

  68. TLTABQ (ha, is everything turning into the captcha check?),
    I’m not positive, but has Russert ever evinced any economic nous? A google trawl has this bit, and though I’m not sure, I think it might be indicative.

  69. You know, going back, there seems to be some indication that Hillary was actually quite conciliatory with the Independence campaign at the time, quote the opposite of what she claimed tonight.
    I posted it over at my place ->
    So as to not take up room here
    But I think it’s worth reading. She was the one that wouldn’t “resounce” or “reject” the anti-Semitic groups — in fact she tried to have the worst of all possible ways… Ironically — and somewhat sadly — Obama’s response to Farrakhan was far harsher than what she actualy did to the Independents. Bad move on her part to bring that up

  70. If serbia with the support of Russia goes into Kosovo I suggest everyone remember WWI and complain and so forth, but do no more than they would in any random African country. Because there is no Cuban missile crisis sort of strategic advantage to some enemy here.
    If Hillary or Obama are weak and do something diplomatic, and McCain is strong and starts WWIII and get us all killed then that makes the choice pretty simple.
    Good news is it probably won’t happen.

  71. liberal japonicus,
    You can call me LeftTurn for short it that is easier.
    You are right that the debate moderators haven’t stressed the economy (except for Russert’s gotcha question to Hillary about job creation promises in her NY Senate run which she very deftly parried), but that hasn’t stopped the candidates in this and other debates from verbally pushing the moderators off to the side and talking about whatever they wanted to talk about.
    If one of the candidates really wanted to talk about the economy, we would have heard from them by now. For reasons I already summarized, I don’t think any of them wants to be the first one to break the bad news to the American people. Might as well start wearing a cardigan to remind people of Jimmy Carter.
    I just find it frustrating that IMHO Obama is probably going to spend a good portion of the next 4 years giving people the 21st Century equivalent of FDR’s fireside chats and trying to figure out how to restart a busted economy, but nobody is really talking about the details of what is wrong with our economy in this election cycle in a serious way.
    Coming up soon we have some very hard decisions to make, but this election will not deliver a mandate on what we should do, because it isn’t being discussed.
    Should we use fiscal and monetary policy to do our best to prop up the inflated values of our housing sector and other assets, which will probably mean a replay of 1990’s Japan, where mark-to-book valuations have drawn out the agony every so slowly over a decade and a half?
    Or should we take all of our lumps now (hoping to get it over with as quickly as possible), admit that something like 30% of our national wealth never really existed, except on paper courtesy of negative-real-interest-rate loans that we were fools to indulge in, and risk triggering a 2nd Great Depression if the resulting deflation is allowed to unwind all at once?
    I don’t know the answer to these questions. I don’t know anyone who is smart and who thinks that they do. But I suspect that what we choose to do in the near future may make a difference in whether some of us 2-3 years from now are standing in line at soup kitchens talking about the good-ole-days back in 2008 when debating politics on blogs was what we did with our spare time rather than tending to our vegetable gardens and waiting for the few and far between remaining job openings.
    Maybe we don’t have a choice, that it is already out of our hands. Still, I feel like it would be nice if these choices were to be made on at least a semi-informed basis, so that we could have the small consolation of meeting our destiny with open eyes. Right now I feel like we are sleeping walking into the future, and I don’t like it one bit.
    Hopefully it won’t be that bad. I tend to be a bit of an economic pessimist, what with being a child of the 1970’s reared by parents with childhood memories of the Great Depression, and grandparents who never threw anything away. EVER. So grain of salt, etc.

  72. Here’s my right wingnut view:
    I thought that HRC kept herself in check better than I expected. She had a few moments, but they were minor. Obama came over to me as more presidential and gets the nod. But I have a hard time being objective about HRC.
    The health care “debate” was boring and worthless. I still wouldn’t know what the differences are between their plans if I didn’t have internet access. HRC gets away with saying she’ll improve quality and lower costs through a government mandate (and free stickers for everyone!!!) without explanation of how in the world it will pay for itself. Oh, I forget, with TAX CREDITS. And they accuse Reagan of creative economics.
    The same went for NAFTA. They both got away with saying they would “renegotiate” because some parts of the country have been worse off without saying what, exactly, they would change other than apparently making Mexico and Cananda adopt OSHA, CERLCA and a host of other regulations. Nothing about trucks from Mexico, nurses and attorneys from Canada, etc.
    Overall, my impression of the debate is that both are well spoken, but not all that substantive. Certainly nothing to write home about. High marks for no major gaffes, speaking well, and good presentation style. Middling marks for substance. I though Obama handled the last question particularly well.

  73. Taking exception; my daughter is a Canadian nurse in LA and you and yours are fortunate in her presence.
    Left turn: Yes.
    Since the late 60ā€™s Iā€™ve been waiting to see justice done on Wall Street, so my judgment is understood to be skewed.
    Still, a scary storm is brewing and those hard rain clouds are casting some daunting shadows; and to pretend we can bring the sun back by ignoring the clouds suggests parallels with deck chairs on the Titanic.
    That said, and granting that with all the anxious glances and confused scurrying by the experts no one seems able to move from diagnosis to remedy, encouraging the conclusion that there is none.
    My likely starry-eyed assessment of Obamaā€™s larger strategy: To establish his good faith and readiness to listen, to friend and foe alike, and his capable and even-handed intelligence; and so to nurture an active consensus amenable to concerted cooperative effort, that being the only means by which we may hope to minimize the damage and redirect national energies constructively.
    Iā€™ve noted before my conclusion that in such potentially dreadful times we can hope for no finer leader to help us steer around and past the truly fatal bits. Lincoln was the captain we needed in his time. Obamaā€™s appearance at such a time as this seems set to supply us with whatever helpful correctives as may be humanly possible.
    By stark contrast his opponentā€™s campaign offers no such hope, with its head so deeply planted in shifting sands.
    In short and by way of reprise: Yeah. Either we keep sinking in our self-made quicksand, or we reorganize ourselves (writing as an expat) around a new idealā€” well, not new but much neglected, of cooperative mutual regard.
    Tactics towards that end will have to be principled, but canā€™t be otherwise predetermined; which is why specifics canā€™t be easily defined beforehand, and can only be sketched in broad terms.

  74. Oh, and LeftTurn; your rant was particularly satisfying. Having made the odd attempt at such summaries, I thought you nailed things admirably. Concise and comprehensive is my reading.

  75. NAFTA doesn’t need to be “regotiated”: it’s working fine. Wages and standards in Mexico are steadily rising — indeed, despite its proximity to the US, Mexico is starting to lose jobs to China. Evironmental concerns are improving. By historical standards, the US has experienced incredibly low unemployment during the NAFTA period — yes, even today, in the midst of a (probable) recession.
    I can see some justification to “tweak” NAFTA in limited respects, but all this talk of “renegotiating” NAFTA is pure pandering to the unions in industries that will never see job growth in the US, as well as to the nativists in the Democratic party.*
    Very, very disappointing on this front.
    von
    *Before you point out that the Republican party also has its fair share of nativists: I know, I know.

  76. NAFTA doesn’t need to be “regotiated”: it’s working fine.
    Von, a very, very disappointing and uninformed comment. One that just spits back the CW of those who have benefited from so called “free trade.”
    These “free trade” agreements (not just NAFTA) are nothing more than a way to get around having to bargain with labor. They are a stick used beat down labor and take away what little fairness workers not so long ago had to fight and die for.
    “Free trade” agreements have devastated labor, not just in the US but all over the world (mostly b/c it is practically impossible to organize labor on a global scale – capital has no such problem). The result is NO safety for labor that gets paid impossibly low wages along with NO environmental protections.

  77. I simply don’t have the time to make the full argument, but here are some cogent comments on the matter from elsewhere:
    Divguy at Yglesias post on NAFTA:
    Wow. One often forgets that the netroots is wealthy and aggressively economically centrist, but this thread is a good reminded. Thank god we’re not the base.
    NAFTA has caused a loss of jobs in America, and the gains from free trade have been realized almost entirely at the top of the income ladder. It has also cut the legs out from under organized labor, which is a big part of the reason why the new wealth has not “trickled down.” …
    In Mexico, the new jobs that have been created have been primarily lower wage, lower (no) benefits, lower (no) safety restrictions and lower (no) environmental protections. It has had disastrous effects on the agricultural economy of Mexico, due to the “freely traded”, massively subsidized American corn that has flooded their market, and has replaced those jobs with dangerous, barely-paid, totally unregulated labor in the maquiladores. (Wages in maquiladores about about 50% lower than the wages in other Mexican manufacturing sectors.) The upper tenth of a percentile has seen very large profits, though.
    From Dean Baker:
    NAFTA did little to reduce tariff barriers to imports from Mexico. These were already low. What NAFTA was about was removing all the non-tariff barriers that prevented U.S. firms from locating manufacturing operations in Mexico and exporting their output back to the United States. By putting U.S. manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in Mexico, NAFTA lowered their wages.
    …we could ask hospitals what barriers prevent them from hiring Mexican doctors who would be happy to work for one-half of the wages of their U.S. counterparts. We could do the same for law firms, universities, and even newspapers. We could standardize education and professional standards so that Mexican kids could grow up and work as doctors in Los Angeles or lawyers in New York, just as easily as kids born in Chicago or Boston. This would lead to huge gains to the U.S. economy and greater equality in the United States instead of greater inequality.
    But, we didn’t… Instead we cut the number of foreign medical residents entering the country in half and changed our licensing procedures to make it harder for foreign doctors to enter the country. Furthermore, it would be illegal for a Wal-Mart University or a Wal-Mart hospital to explicitly hire foreign professors or doctors because they are willing to work for much lower wages than their U.S. born (or greencard holding) counterparts. Under the law, these institutions must first try to hire U.S. citizens before they can seek out foreign professionals.
    If we had the same laws for manufactured goods, Wal-Mart would have to claim that they had tried to find U.S. made shoes or toys (and failed) before they could import these goods from China. Anyone could recognize that this would be protectionist in the case of manufactured goods, why is it so hard to understand that it is protectionist when applied to highly paid professional services.

  78. Appreciate that your feelings are genuine, A-Train, but the CW is the CW for a reason.
    Trade always has winners and losers. That does not mean that it is not better on net.

  79. A-Train, if you can quantify the purported job losses from NAFTA, that would be helpful. Ross Perot was fond of citing a 6 million figure for predicted job loss, which has been soundly discredited. What’s the new line?
    (The evidence that I’ve seen suggests 41,000 jobs lost over the first three years that can be attributed to NAFTA, during a period in which the US economy routinely generated more than that number of jobs in a month.)

  80. By the way, A-Train, I share certain of Dean Baker’s complaints regarding the artificial monopoly powers created by licensing regimes. But he’s not address the actual benefits or detriments of NAFTA per se, only pointing out that there may be advantages to further relaxing barriers to labor market entry.

  82. Von, thanks for the civil reply (realize I was being a bit of a jerk).
    Right now I’m busy w/work. But a quick answer, it’s not just job losses (b/c the jobs that replace the lost ones often suck). And numbers on average wages distort as well because some people have gotten very wealthy based on these trade agreements(Bill Gates and 100 McDonald’s employees average a high income).
    It’s just common sense. Here, we have hard won labor regulations (OSHA, child labor, unions, work week limits, etc) and envrionmental regulations. These force mfg to internalize more of the costs of their activity. In China and Mexico they don’t. But workers in China and Mexico cannot afford the products they make. Soon neither will workers here in the US.
    If you truly are interested, the info is out there (e.g. check out labor practices and environmental issues in China — workers are disposable, in many ways it is worse that how it was in America in late 19th early 20th century).
    In any case, it’s a drag, but it can’t last. It’s a short term gain for those in the financial sector and those who help corporations move their money around and downsize. Nobody is going to be able to buy this stuff. The only reason it continues now is that the middle class is willing to go into debt (perhaps in the false hope that things will get better?).

  84. Von, if you have the inclination, how about you point me to some of the benefits of “free trade” agreements? I realize that there are many arguments for it based on economic theories of markets and trade, but how about some evidence of actual benefits?
    I’m also a bit tied up with work, but will try to respond at the end of the day (including reviewing the papers that you’ve cited). (I’m traveling tomorrow & so if you don’t hear from me by the end of the day, assume that this debate is continued for another time.) There is a lot of empirical, peer-reviewed evidence supporting the longstanding economic theories that demonstrate the advantages of free trade in the abstract. There are also some specific studies of NAFTA that may be relevant. I’ll try to dig them up.
    A final point, in the event that I’m not able to get back to this: One reasonable measure regarding whether trade deals tend to, on net, improve economies is to take a look at the history of such deals. In this, the longstanding history of trade deals has been toward freer and more open trade. You see this in NAFTA, but also in the push to create the EEC – a push that was accompanied by horrific claims that Spanish workers taking high-paid German jobs, et al. Residents of Spain and Germany seem to believe that they’ve all benefited from the deal, however, because they keep pushing for greater and greater economic integration — e.g., toward the EU and then toward a unified monetary policy (the Euro). And Spain and Germany have each done tremendously well. Indeed, the current barriers to EU expansion are not about free trade — that has already been accomplished — but about who controls foriegn and monetary policy, as well as debates regarding culture and nationhood. (By the way, although a free-trade proponent, I’d probably be labeled a Euroskeptic in the current EU environment.)

  85. If you want to mourn the death of manufacturing *jobs* in the US, attack the real culprit–increased mechanization. Manufacturing of *stuff* (including such mainstays as steel)is up. It just takes fewer workers to do it.

  86. Leaving aside the issue of NAFTA, on which I’m not qualified to comment, this:
    Appreciate that your feelings are genuine, A-Train, but the CW is the CW for a reason.
    …has got to be one of the dumbest things you’ve written, von. Seriously. You may be right on this topic — like I said, I’m not qualified to comment on NAFTA — but in general, this is rubbish. There are myriad reasons why the CW could be the CW, many of which are entirely independent of the relevant facts — as we’ve seen documented innumerable times on this august website alone.
    [Possible, and entirely plausible, alternative here: the CW that NAFTA works is because the people who profit most from it are the people who set the narrative agenda, or friends with those who do. Lord knows that’s happened before (viz. “death tax”) and will happen again.]

  87. I didn’t watch. I wanted to best Hilzoy’s unbroken streak.
    Re russert: If the debates were a thread on Obsidian Wings, Russert would be the troll.
    NAFTA, free trade: I’m pro-free trade, net- net, but the nets are close. Short word to the wise, however, to my fellow free traders.
    The wholesale dismissal (I’m not addressing Von at this point) of the very real concerns about factories closing down, computer jobs going overseas, environmental degradation abroad, workplace and employee protections, product safety, etc, has been dumb, dumb, dumb.
    Business people do in fact seek cheap labor, try to escape regulation of all kinds, and maximize profits. Resisting ameliorative steps because they might cost the taxpayer a little extra or violate precious ideologies is dumb, dumb, dumb (we’re up to six dumbs already) merely from a policy public relations standpoint.
    I thought free marketeers had human nature pegged and knew how to incentivize and disincentivize. Telling a factory full of lower middle-class workers that their jobs are kaput and that the American ecomomy is infinitely flexible and they’ll be fine if they move out of their communities and that look, your wages may be curtailed for a good long while, but the great thing about our flexible economy is that you can shop at Wal Mart for cheaper goods, which are cheaper because of your willingness to lose your jobs and livelihoods, and by the way, I wouldn’t let your kids chew on those cheap toys if I were you, and expect folks to say, you know, I see your point … (well, I think we’ve reached the magic number of 7 dumbs)….
    … my misfortune is good. The destruction of my job is creative and I should fawn over that creation like I do over the fingerpainting my kid brings home school, which I understand you’d like to privatize. In fact, when I get a new job, I hope I lose that one, too, for the sake of shareholder value and so that the Club for Growth’s ideology remains unviolated.
    Did we really think that people would kiss the ring on the invisible hand that just slapped them? Bite me (passive voiced anonymous biting)! Infinite dumbitude.
    Someone, I forget who, said right here in a discussion regarding global warming (analogy in the works here), that folks in low-lying coastal areas will adjust if the worst happens and their front stoops are underwater. They’ll quietly go inside, pack their bags, and rowboat their way to the bus station and move inland to start new lives, their homes now being worthless, unless the real estate is purchased by a submarine docking enterprise, but if not, buy a snorkel at Wal Mart up there on the hill and go with the creative destructive flow. Things happen. And trying to prevent those things from happening or maybe spending taxpayer dollars to blunt the hard edges of things happening is, sorry, against the rules.
    Imagine, if you will, Godzilla rampaging thru lower Manhatten, crushing cars, knocking over buildings. Everyone is running and screaming in full panic mode, you know, human nature in its natural mode. The free rampaging reptile ideologue apparently expects to stand in the middle of the street and reason with folks. Hey, calm down. Get your stuff and move to Cincinnati which the gigantic reptiles haven’t reached … yet. Big angry lizards happen but they aren’t angry at you. They’re just doing their inexorable thing and if the big foot lands on you, take solace in the fact that the big lizard is working exactly as someone, it is not for us to ask who, designed it to work.
    View your schmushing by big lizards as a tradeoff. Besides, big lizards make room for needed renovation and are fairly creative, despite themselves.
    What did the ideologue expect? Everyone would stop in their tracks, stop screaming, shrug their shoulders and ignore the big reptile?
    Apparently.
    Well, until, say, the entire American legal profession (except the ACLU; they embrace low wages for other reasons) is outsourced to a warehouse full of low-wage attorneys* in Bangalore who can just as well write legal briefs in fake Latin on their Dell Computers and push the send button.
    Hey, that lizard is doggoned heavy. Ow!
    *All references to attorneys are generic, as are all references to reptiles. Please do not mistake generic references for personal references. šŸ˜‰

  88. My growing disbelief about free trade in the NAFTA style stems from macro issues. Let me lay out what I wonder about and see if anyone can help.
    I know that the big picture for most American workers is bad. Real wages are stagnant or worse. Health care and education costs are up and up. Risk is up. Pensions are routinely looted and removed. Union membership is just barely on an uptick after decades of decline. Inequality is way up. These are all trends in motion well before NAFTA, but when I look at charts of their behavior in the era since NAFTA, I find no sign of relief in its wake.
    Is the idea, then, that things would be even worse without NAFTA? If so, which things? There are times when that’s the good you can get from action, and I don’t mean to knock it as a principle. But neither do I ever see an explanation of NAFTA’s benefits that takes the big picture into account. Anyone want to help out here adn explain why I might wish to resume my now-abandoned support for free trade?

  89. William F. Buckley has died.
    I agreed with him exactly zero times, but if you had the opportunity to watch “Firing Line”, especially the conversations with John Kenneth Galbraith, you would have witnessed two witty, eloquent gentleman who knew what to do with language (if you carry a thesaurus) at work.
    The callow hacks who work for his magazine could learn something about how to get over callow hackitude by examining the callow hack Buckley of the early 1950s with the later grown-up Buckley.
    YMMV
    Note: I can be callow and can be a hack, but multitasking both at the same time is best avoided.

  90. Who is ohn Thulllen? The Swedish me who can’t spell, that’s who.
    Sebastian:
    “If you want to mourn the death of manufacturing *jobs* in the U.S, attack the real culprit, mechanization.” etc.
    There would be fewer attacks on either if the displaced workers didn’t have cigar ash tapped onto their heads as they were displaced, generally speaking.
    See, placing the jobs inside * * is the problem. People’s livelihoods are not to be bracketed by quotes. Riots ensue.
    šŸ˜‰ without the qualifying * *

  91. I know that the big picture for most American workers is bad. Real wages are stagnant or worse. Health care and education costs are up and up. Risk is up. Pensions are routinely looted and removed. Union membership is just barely on an uptick after decades of decline. Inequality is way up. These are all trends in motion well before NAFTA, but when I look at charts of their behavior in the era since NAFTA, I find no sign of relief in its wake.

    Nobody said that NAFTA cured everything.
    “Real wages are stagnant or worse.”
    By this you mean inflation adjusted wages. Most of that has been in the price of oil, which is mostly NAFTA-independent (with your next sentence to be dealt with next).
    For the goods that NAFTA impacts, the prices are down, so real wage stagnation in general with respect to NAFTA and goods that it implicates comes out with NAFTA ahead. For you to believe that NAFTA was bad, you must believe that wages would be up, and that prices of NAFTA-implicated good would not be up enough to make up for that.
    “Health care and education costs are up and up.”
    First you should notice that these are two goods that have absolutely nothing to do with NAFTA. Two things impact that. First, (as to health care) technology costs money. We have had enormous technological advances. Health care costs for any standard basket of goods have gone down. We just want the constant upgrading of technology. Assuming the government would allow it, you could easily afford a 1980s gold-plated health plan with 1980s technologies.
    Second, please note that the things which aren’t getting cheaper aren’t things that are subject to NAFTA-style competition…
    “Risk is up.”
    I’m pretty sure I read on washingtonmonthly that this has turned out not to be true. Income variability has increased slightly, but credit availability which was mostly out of reach of the middle class has smoothed that out.
    “Pensions are routinely looted and removed.”
    So far as I can tell this has absolutely nothing to do with NAFTA. (And so far as it has to do with municipalities, it is a failure to save over the good years).
    “Inequality is way up.”
    This has a lot to do with the return on education. Yes it is harder to be middle class without an education. But the main reason the assembly-line jobs are gone is mechanization. That happened in the 1970s–well before NAFTA.
    “These are all trends in motion well before NAFTA, but when I look at charts of their behavior in the era since NAFTA, I find no sign of relief in its wake.”
    NAFTA wasn’t intended to reverse those trends. It was intended to provide cheap goods so that those trends didn’t bite as much. It did that.
    Essentially it sounds like you wanted NAFTA to fix everything that was tricky about the US economy.
    That is unrealistic.

  92. Sebastian, what I wrote was this: Is the idea, then, that things would be even worse without NAFTA? If so, which things? There are times when that’s the good you can get from action, and I don’t mean to knock it as a principle. But neither do I ever see an explanation of NAFTA’s benefits that takes the big picture into account. And it’s what I’m asking. I don’t think any trade policy cures all woes or destroys all benefits. I’m asking for a sense of what it is NAFTA’s done that’s good for the American public at large, particularly with the concerns I enumerated.
    So you’re saying that NAFTA couldn’t keep workers’ situations from sucking, but gives them extra stuff so that they can slide down to misery in more comfort thanks to some goods being cheaper? That’s, um, interesting, but doesn’t really command my support. But I do want to say that it’s a much clearer answer than I almost ever get on trade questions, and appreciate that.

  94. “So you’re saying that NAFTA couldn’t keep workers’ situations from sucking, but gives them extra stuff so that they can slide down to misery in more comfort thanks to some goods being cheaper?”
    Again you’re trying to mix everything together at once. NAFTA was certainly not intended to reverse the trend of mechanization.
    It was not intended to make cheaper health care.
    It was not intended to reward people for not getting education.
    Do you believe it was? If not, why are you bringing all of that up. It sounds like you have general complaints about how the US economy functions that have almost nothing to do with NAFTA.
    Yes, it was supposed to provide cheaper goods for US workers. You are so dismissive about that, but most people work in order to buy things. The things that have to do with NAFTA (and free trade in general) are cheaper. The things that don’t have to do with NAFTA are expensive, yes. But thank heavens you don’t have to pay twice as much for an awful GM car that will barely last 75,000 miles (and therefore that you will have to replace 1.5 times more often at twice the price) while you are also trying to pay for high-tech medical care and zoned-into-lavishly-expensive homes. You can come within spitting distance of the audiophile’s 1970s $10,000 stereo system with a $300 iPod and $150 Shure headphones. Oh and it fits in your pocket. And you can get a perfectly acceptable coffee machine at WalMart for $15.
    The things that don’t have to do with NAFTA are really expensive.
    The things that do have to do with NAFTA aren’t.
    The costs associated with NAFTA are small, unless you try to blame the entire state of things that came long before it on NAFTA.
    Without NAFTA we would have expensive health care, expensive education, expensive housing AND expensive consumer goods.
    So NAFTA only fixes one of those things. Why does that make it bad?
    Also, NAFTA helped Mexico a whole lot without costing us almost anything more than speeding up the job loss by about two years for jobs which would have been lost due to mechanization anyway. And that happened in one of the bigger economic booms in recent memory, so the pain of it was largely mitigated by the amazing health of the economy at the time. We got to great help out Mexico economically (and got some pushes to make it more like a real liberal democracy at the same time) for very close to zero cost. That is fantastic.

  95. Sebastian:
    “Income variability has increased slightly, but credit availability which was mostly out of reach of the middle class has smoothed that out.”
    Given recent credit turmoil, that isn’t as anodyne as your statement implies. Debt has replaced savings.
    In fact, it leads to risk being up as higher riskier returns are sought by investors to compensate them for looser credit standards.
    Further, as the social safety net (pensions, social security schemes which permit investment in stock markets) is drawn to riskier assets to maximize returns, risk is heightened at least in the short to medium term. (Stock market risk evens out over time, as long as you live long enough to get there.)
    Further still, loosened credit standards and completely unregulated credit interest rates have caused savings to plunge or at least have caused savings to seek higher, but riskier returns in riskier asset classes, ie. stocks.
    Yes, these all are tradeoffs, many of them net positive, but let’s admit risk is up.
    Further yet again, many corporate pension plans are deliberately underfunded in good times and bad. And, if you look at how 401K plans are, generally speaking, misused, unused, poorly invested, etc, despite efforts to educate the investing employees, there is a problem.

  96. “I’m asking for a sense of what it is NAFTA’s done that’s good for the American public at large, particularly with the concerns I enumerated.”
    NAFTA has nothing particularly to do with concerns you enumerated.
    You seem to think that it does, or that it should have. Why in the world do you think that?
    What does NAFTA have to do with health care costs rising?
    What does NAFTA have to with education costs rising?
    The funny thing is that your complaint about NAFTA is mostly about high costs in things that don’t have to do with NAFTA. So you clearly understand that high costs suck for things you want.
    Yet you are completely dismissive about lower costs on the things that actually have to do with NAFTA.
    That makes no sense to me. NAFTA didn’t promise to lower prices on everything. But it means that you can afford NAFTA-implicated things AND still pay for other more expensive things. Without NAFTA you would still have to pay for expensive health care, AND you wouldn’t be able to afford anything else.
    So NAFTA keeps prices much lower in a small area and has almost no effect in other areas. Why is that bad?

  97. Sebastian, I do expect free trade to create some noticeable improvement in the quality of life of workers below to the top rungs, based on the rhetoric of its supporters. So I’d be looking for it to make them wealthier, or more secure, or something – to do something that significantly offsets the weight of complications that aren’t very directly connected to trade.

  98. By the way, I agree with you Sebastian, that developing economies are better off and that is fantastic.
    However, if 4 billion volunteer workers from planet Xanadon’t take the jobs from 1.2 billion Chinese workers, you will have 1.2 billion unhappy Chinese workers and what do you tell them.
    Just an observation: We have foreign born doctors and nurses flooding the United States seeking higher rents and we have Americans seeking lower-priced surgery in India. Good for airline travel, I suppose, but stewardesses and pilots are having their wages cut anyway. Seems like a lot of inefficient coming and going to me, but I’m a simple person.

  99. I also wonder how much the opportunities of NAFTA-style free trade have contributed to worsening workers’ conditions by encouraging managerial folly. Managers who feel like they can dump more and more of this bunch of folks in favor of that one may be more inclined to unilaterally abolish the pension fund, for instance, and political parties getting larger donations from them may be less inclined to prosecute such things as evident fraud and contract breaking. As with other bad things, the trends there were in motion beforehand, but here the trade agreement may have a more direct role to play in worsening them.
    I’d have to do a bunch of research to get any sense of whether there’s anything to the hunch, though,a nd that’ll have to wait for a day when I’m doing less allergy-driven puking.

  100. (The last part being why I’m wandering off for a while despite the exchanges being really interesting to me. I’ll catch up, promise.)

  101. “If you want to mourn the death of manufacturing *jobs* in the U.S, attack the real culprit, mechanization.”
    This is an intuitive judgment without much basis in reality. Mechanization creates its own manufacturing and related support industries.

  102. “Sebastian, I do expect free trade to create some noticeable improvement in the quality of life of workers below to the top rungs, based on the rhetoric of its supporters.”
    Yes, and it does. We have MUCH cheaper stuff on the stuff that is NAFTA-implicated. You can afford to spend most of your time working to pay off health care and education loans and housing while still having other nice things. That improves quality of life. It improves it a lot! Your complaint seems to be that cheaper health care and housing would help EVEN MORE.
    You’re right.
    But that has absolutely nothing to do with free trade or NAFTA.
    Unless you expect it to fix everything, that isn’t even an argument against NAFTA.

  103. “Mechanization creates its own manufacturing and related support industries.”
    Mechanization creates all sorts of jobs. But they aren’t typically manufacturing jobs. That is why the 1990s were a boom despite the fact that the number of manufacturing jobs dropped like a stone in the ocean.

  104. Sebastian: You are so dismissive about that, but most people work in order to buy things.
    This is not in the slightest a criticism of Sebastian, but I’ve never seen one sentence summarize so aptly what’s wrong with the United States. Or capitalism in general.
    The things that don’t have to do with NAFTA are really expensive.
    Maybe, but what do iPods and Shure headphones have to do with that? iPods are made in China, as are Shure headphones. That’s where to look for the vast majority of cheap consumer goods nowadays; NAFTA has absolutely nothing to do with that. See, e.g., here.
    [Disclaimer: I don’t agree with everything in the article — if for no other reason than it was written in 2003 — but I think it gives a pretty decent overview.]

  105. “This is not in the slightest a criticism of Sebastian, but I’ve never seen one sentence summarize so aptly what’s wrong with the United States. Or capitalism in general.”
    The vast majority of people in history and even now in other countries work so that they don’t starve to death. What is right about capitalism in general is that it makes it possible for the vast majority of the population to work to buy things since they don’t generally have to worry about starving to death. And if they want to, they could live at a much better level than most people in the world and get paid relatively less than other Americans to do almost anything they could want to do.
    The philosophical ideal of the good life involving work you could love that didn’t have to with mere survival has been talked about by aristocrats since ancient Greece, but not lived by any large percentage of people anywhere in the history of the world. And I would venture to guess, that even the small percentage of people who get to do that here and now represent a quadrupling of that percentage compared to any country 50-5,000 years ago and compared to most now.
    “Maybe, but what do iPods and Shure headphones have to do with that? iPods are made in China, as are Shure headphones. That’s where to look for the vast majority of cheap consumer goods nowadays; NAFTA has absolutely nothing to do with that.” Bruce and I have been talking about both NAFTA and free trade, and the stated worries about NAFTA are equally relevant to China.

  106. Just to be a nit-picking choad, the idea that an iPod and decent headphones reproduce music at anything approaching the fidelity of even a 30-year-old audiophile system is patently ridiculous. Even the highest-quality lossless compression formats playable on an iPod lose audio information that is easily audible on my 40 year old Beatles vinyl, a $150 turntable and a consumer-grade A/V receiver.
    Now back to the smart-people portion of the thread.

  107. I’m agreeing with Phil, once more. An iPod/headphones is, however, just as good as my JC Penney turntable with $15 cartridge, Jensen speakers, and JC Penney receiver combo was back in 1979.
    Which explains pretty well why I ditched all of that ASAP in favor of better gear. A decent integrated amp and a Dual turntable with a Grado cartridge fixed things up pretty well. Which, even with the Jensen speakers, still beat the hell out of an iPod. So, I agree with Phil, but would not say that you’d need an audiophile quality system (which would, really, need some definition) to beat out an iPod.
    Me <- choad

  108. Even the highest-quality lossless compression formats playable on an iPod lose audio information that is easily audible on my 40 year old Beatles vinyl, a $150 turntable and a consumer-grade A/V receiver.
    i’ll see your nit-pick and raise you a pedantism*: lossless formats (ex. FLAC, WAV) have exactly the same information as the CD they were ripped from, by definition.
    but, sure, the iPod’s sound hardware might not be up to the level of a good amp, and even the best headphones fail to deliver the kind of visceral punch that a big ol subwoofer can. on the other hand, i can’t bring that stuff to work with me!
    * – it is so a word, i looked it up.

  109. Phil:
    Yes, it’s like the space food in 2001 A Space Odyssey: portable, convenient, kinda cutely packaged, but shouldn’t my taste buds be picking up more subtle flavors from that little square of pink stuff labeled filet mignon?
    Plus, we’ve lost liner notes and album cover design. Not to mention the undefinable something that came with an album full of songs, divided into two sides, and the excitement that came from pausing and turning that vinyl over and hearing, say, “I’ve Got A Feeling” on side two.
    And then add in the extreme compression lathered on during mixing if making your digital recording even more harsh and less dynamic is the goal.
    As an aside, I have a 1985 Toyota Camry which burns oil, has a broken air conditioner and a driver side window frozen shut, but there is something about the speaker (placement) in that piece of crap that is amazing. I’ve heard stuff on Beatles songs from the radio that I just can’t pick up elsewhere.
    Upside to I-Pods. They’ll serve as good hearing aids when my kid is 50 years old.
    What? I can’t hear you. Let me turn down my stereo.

  110. “They’ll serve as good hearing aids when my kid is 50 years old.”
    Nah. By 50, your kids will be wearing.
    They won’t be holding onto decades-old antiques, any more than you use a Victrola trumpet amplifier for anything.

  111. I don’t see what’s so odd about purchasing a $10,000 dollar audio system to listen to Jack White’s $41 Monkey Wards guitar that’s guaranteed not to crack.

  112. You know it’s really special when you poke fun at a candidate’s remarks and then say something even dumber.
    Obama answered the hypothetical given to him by Russert, namely “What do you do if after you pull out, you then find out that al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq?” I don’t have the exact wording of Russert’s question, but as I remember it, it conversationally implied that Al Qaeda would be forming a base that they didn’t have now. Okay, stupid, ham-fisted attack. Not the first. Not the last. But then things just get delusional:

    And my friends, if we left, they (al-Qaida) wouldn’t be establishing a base,” McCain said Wednesday. “They’d be taking a country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen, my friends. I will not surrender. I will not surrender to al-Qaida.”

    Taking the country? Taking the country?? What the … is he talking about? And he’s making fun of Obama’s comments???

  113. Yes, it’s like the space food in 2001 A Space Odyssey: portable, convenient, kinda cutely packaged, but shouldn’t my taste buds be picking up more subtle flavors from that little square of pink stuff labeled filet mignon?

    You’re assuming that some of us, at our advanced age, would be capable of picking up all those subtleties and nuances….

  114. I think McCain wins this round though with ā€œWhat we heard last night was the timidity of despair.ā€ Expect that to become a regular sound biteā€¦

  115. I think McCain wins this round though with ā€œWhat we heard last night was the timidity of despair.ā€ Expect that to become a regular sound biteā€¦
    Uh huh…uh… what does it mean, though?
    If McCain wants to toss around sound bites that don’t actually mean anything if you think about ’em for more than a half second, and he wants to try that with Obama, who is cool under fire and then comes back so fast and sharp you don’t even know you’re bleeding until you walk away….
    Hey, Johnny Mac. Knock yourself out.

  116. OCSteve. You call this winning the round? Is it butt-covering or laziness to admit that you didn’t actually watch the debate, you’re just criticizing the candidate for what you were told he said?
    What is wrong with Republicans and their crowds? Their candidate repeats it as a point of pride that he didn’t watch the debate.
    Maybe that works on crowds that are predisposed to be dismissive of Democratics. But to the rest of us, it just sounds as if he’s too arrogant to actually pay attention to what his opponents are saying. He just wants to score point.

  117. Uh huh…uh… what does it mean, though?
    In this case ā€“ just that he got the best sound bite IMO out of a debate he wasnā€™t even part of. I canā€™t think of anything really memorable either O or C said last night. But Iā€™m pretty sure youā€™ll see McCain get a lot of mileage out of that line.
    And it does have meaning, playing off the ā€œaudacity of hopeā€ bit. Thatā€™s kind of Oā€™s shtick isnā€™t it? Gloom and despair, everything is bad, nothing good to be found in any direction you lookā€¦ All you have left is hope standing at the edge of the abyssā€¦

  118. Gloom and despair, everything is bad, nothing good to be found in any direction you lookā€¦ All you have left is hope standing at the edge of the abyssā€¦
    Hoo boy. I don’t doubt that’ll be McCain’s message, and I don’t doubt your opinion that it’ll go over well with the GOP base.
    What I doubt is that it’ll go over well with anyone else, esp. when Obama keeps talking about optimism and hope and binding up the country’s wounds.
    Given a choice between McCain’s doom and gloom mongering and Obama’s “we can do better to make things better”message of aspiration, though…seriously, OCSteve, do you think McCain has the better message? “Coz I sure don’t.

  119. Every time I hear Bill refer to the Umma, the tune “Umma umma umma umma umma chameleon” starts going through my head. I keep thinking there’s a joke in there, what with it being sung by Boy George, and us having George the Boy King as president and all, but my head is too stuffed with string-matching algorithms at the moment to find it.

  120. ā€œWhat we heard last night was the timidity of despair.ā€
    bleh. that weak. McCain’s a grumpy old dim-witted weenie. and he’s gonna get his ass kicked.

  121. gwangung:
    “You’re assuming …”
    Well, if we’re going to bring entropy into this, why don’t we just all kill ourselves. %).
    So, last night, the 18-year old senior in high school, who has made the mistake of taking a psychology class by way of becoming dangerous with a little bit of knowledge, is pontificating at the dinner table about Freud’s stages of life thinking …. the oral stage, the anal stage, and the sexual phase … etc.
    When does the sexual stage start, I asks, in the cause of intellectual inquiry, and because I’ve met his girlfriend and she’s way too pretty. Between the end of the anal phase which ends at toilet training and puberty, he answers, not being as exacting as Gary Farber.
    For both men and women?, I continue. Yes, he says, but women’s sexual phase ends at menopause and when procreation and child-rearing have been concluded, you know, like we’re all insects or spiders.
    How about men? The sexual phase ends at death, he with the pretty girlfriend opines, contradicting Woody Allen.
    I says, that’s two pieces of bad news in one day for men. At this point, his Mom has ceased eye contact with us, having spotted something extremely interesting in the northwest corner of the ceiling.
    Then she looks at me like a female black widow spider might who has decided she needs dessert, my instinctual procreative tasks being out of the way.
    So, what do the men do between the time of the women’s menopause and this entropic endgame moment, I dare.
    He shrugs and says, you could buy a Winnebago.
    I’ve never run across that term in Freud. Is it dirty?

  125. CaseyL: Given a choice between McCain’s doom and gloom mongering and Obama’s “we can do better to make things better”message of aspiration, though…seriously, OCSteve, do you think McCain has the better message?
    In general I donā€™t know what McCainā€™s message is beyond ā€œfour more yearsā€ and thatā€™s enough for me not to pay attention to much else. Standard caveats: I think Republicans need to be exiled for a while, I wouldnā€™t vote for McCain, if I vote it appears at this point it will be Obama, etc. Butā€¦ McCain was right to call him out on this and he got a sound bite out of it.
    Withdraw from Iraq ā€“ OK, Iā€™m with you. But Iā€™m not on board with Obama thinking weā€™ll just build up forces in Afghanistan as we draw down in Iraq and then someday go back into Iraq if the need arises. Thatā€™s naĆÆve at best. That over the horizon force in Okinawa makes about as much sense.

  126. You really think Obama’s the gloomier of the two candidates?
    I havenā€™t listened to McCain at all really. I assume its boilerplate: stay the course, the surge is working; if you elect a Democrat the terrorists will kill us allā€¦
    Thatā€™s gloom but itā€™s focused. Obamaā€™s campaign is based more on a general malaise ā€“ nothing, nothing at all is right with the country.

  127. OCSteve: The irony here is that the Clinton camp is criticizing him for being too optimistic.
    My general impression of why Obama does well among Republicans is that he’s much less of a “nothing-is-right-with-the-country” candidate than most Democrats.
    Is there any speech or article or YouTube clip you can point to that is an example of this malaise?

  128. i’ll see your nit-pick and raise you a pedantism*: lossless formats (ex. FLAC, WAV) have exactly the same information as the CD they were ripped from, by definition.
    Yeah, I should’ve been more elaborate there, but I was responding from my phone. You’re right — you get a perfect digital-to-digital copy, but the digital original is probably, as Slarti and John allude, crappily mastered and overcompressed, so you’re still only getting a portion of what you get off of well-mastered and -pressed vinyl, or CDs mastered before, say, 1995. (I’m picking that year arbitrarily because that’s when I first noticed recordings starting to really sound like crap.)
    I really need to get a new turntable and start ripping — and listening to! — some of my vinyl. Some of it I’ve repurchased already from iTunes and other sources, and there’s a major difference.

  129. Ara: Is there any speech or article or YouTube clip you can point to that is an example of this malaise?
    I think it started with his SOTU response. Thatā€™s probably not fair as it was a point by point refutation of whatever Bush said was OK. Iā€™m likely exaggerating the feeling in general. Iā€™m just more and more cynical every day and tired of this long long election season.

  130. I’m back from a thoroughly unsuccessful attempt at rest, but am not inclined to reopen the NAFTA exchange right now. I think it’d be fair to say that what’s at issue is basically a matter of values, when it comes to what we ought to give highest priority to, and how we should think about various kinds of people’s prospects for the future. Data aren’t irrelevant to this, but neither do data compel us to endorse a development as good or bad.

  131. Phil’s right about the quality of mastering. The push since the late ’80s has been for more tracks, to allow production tricks, but very often at the cost of the quality in each track. It’s another of those brilliant idjit schemes borne in the ambience of high-level managers convinced their managerial vision lets them see not just the big picture but each detail that may ever interest them more clearly than the people who actually do the work. Apparently some analysts made a case that there was some economy to be had in cutting down on some aspects of mastering in the late ’80s and early ’90s and it became dogma.

  132. Appendix to my 7:41 post: I think questions of value are amenable to debate and often rewardingly so, just not on a day when my head’s so full of congestion and I just plain feel out of it. This is an IOU for such a debate in a suitable future thread.

  133. So, what do the men do between the time of the women’s menopause and this entropic endgame moment, I dare.
    He shrugs and says, you could buy a Winnebago.
    I got a moped. Geriatric-oriented commercials tend to show elderly people smiling and out riding bicycles, but pedaling makes your Depends shift around and bunch up uncomfortably.

  134. Utterly OT: There is something implausible to me about suggesting that gender is the immediate reason HRC appears to be losing to Obama.

    For many Hillary supporters, especially the many strong women who admire the guts and determination she has shown in this campaign, the troubling question is not whether race is defining this campaign, but whether sex — or to put it bluntly, sexism — is. If the problem is that so many people really don’t like Hillary, and reading the blogs is certainly enough to suggest that, the question is why. The economy is an issue on which the Clintons, both of them, have enormous credibility. She has been articulate, enthusiastic and, yes, human. The people who don’t like her generally don’t know her. Could it, in the end, be an issue of gender?

    I think this would be a lot easier to believe if somehow HRCs candidacy had failed to ever gain momentum or just simply failed coming out of the starting blocks. But she was the early and overwhelming favorite in most of these states. What changed? It surely wasn’t HRCs gender. If gender wasn’t a reason for people to withhold their endorsement of Clinton in December, why would it be now?
    I suppose the best argument one could make is that HRCs support hasn’t deminished as much as Obama as consolidated all the anti-Clinton support, the idea being that despite her support in the mid 40s in a lot of places, a majority was still reluctant to vote for her, and sexism was a motive there.
    But, look, one of the reasons Obama is on this winning streak is that he’s eating into her support among women, and he’s at this point nearly tied with her among women. Obama’s numbers among women suggest actual defections, not just a consolidation of the anti-Clinton wing, and it’s probably not likely that women are switching over to Obama owing to sexism.
    I wish people who have the privilege of a platform would actually articulate reasons behind their thinking rather than just making insinuations, particularly when those insinuations involve implicating a whole lot of people in sexism or racism.

  135. Oh fncking jeebus.
    Top story on FoxRepublican National Committee News.com right now:

    Anti-Obama Attacks Focus
    On Farrakhan Endorsement: White House hopeful catches fire over delayed rejection of Nation of Islam leader; his backers extol vast Jewish support

    Including this fnkcing ridiculousness:

    Obama was asked during a debate with Hillary Clinton Tuesday night if he would reject that support ā€” but the Illinois senator at first hedged.
    ā€œI canā€™t say to somebody that he canā€™t say that he thinks Iā€™m a good guy,ā€ Obama said. ā€œYou know, I have been very clear in my denunciations of him and his past statements.”
    …
    Obama relented: ā€œI have to say I donā€™t see a difference between denouncing and rejecting. Thereā€™s no formal offer of help from Minister Farrakhan that would involve me rejecting it. But if the word ā€˜rejectā€™ Senator Clinton feels is stronger than the word ā€˜denounce,ā€™ then Iā€™m happy to concede the point, and I would reject and denounce.ā€
    He earned the crowdā€™s applause, but his handling of the question could spell trouble.

    Oh, and, BTW:

    Obama is a Christian, but rumors about his Muslim background have persisted throughout the campaign, and have been used to suggest he wonā€™t put America first or offer meaningful support to its ally Israel.
    Obamaā€™s mother was a white woman from Kansas, his father was Kenyan and he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, a largely Muslim country. Obama has said his father did not practice though his grandfather converted to Islam.

    I’m not linking.

  136. OCSteve: Iā€™m just more and more cynical every day and tired of this long long election season.
    Dude: Word. And to think: we still have a little over eight months to go! If that don’t give you teh malaise, I don’t know what will….
    But as a campaigning strategy, the m-word is really seldom heard, used, or invoked these days: its popular (if generally incorrect) association with Jimmy Carter has been enough to banish it from the vocabularies of sane politicians the length and breadth of the land. No: I think an Obama-McCain race (in the loftier thematic sense, anyway) is going to sort out along the classic Democratic/Republican divide: “We have problems, but we can (and will) fix them” vs. “We don’t have any problems – no fix necessary!”. Or the latter in its Herbert Hoover variation: “We have problems, but they’ll sort themselves out – eventually.”
    Of course, I also believe the Republicans, this election, are going to leave the “high road” and lofty themes to the top of the ticket: their real campaign is more likely to be an overflowing cloaca of fear, smear and raw hate. Man, how I would love to be proved wrong….

  137. I wish people who have the privilege of a platform would actually articulate reasons behind their thinking rather than just making insinuations…
    Well, while we’re on that topic (not that I have a platform, at least on this topic), but can I posit (whereby “posit” I mean “wildly speculate and likely offend”) that some of Hillary’s supports hold the view that the order of “non-white male presidential succession” goes first to white female and then to black male (or “other”). IOW, someone is is not keeping their place.
    Note that I have little basis for this, other than some people who usually seem sane seem to have gone bonkers.

  138. Ugh: Thanks. You know I f’in hate it when articles just report slander, rumors, and lies about something, under the cover of deniability, because they are merely reporting the rumor, not asserting it.
    Reminds me of a friend I had once who would say the nastiest things about people, but always as what somebody *else* thought about them.

  139. Couldn’t let this pass,from John Cole:

    Long tribute to Buckley at Red State that I found pretty amusing, because if Buckley had said some of the things in the comments section at Red State that he had said publicly (like, for example, Bush should resign he is such a failure, or that the Iraq War was a failure, or that the Bush White House was criminal in regards to the Plame affair), Moe Lane would have banned him without giving it a second thought.

    Hey, watch it there, Cole. Brutus is an honorable man.

  140. ā€œWal-Mart up there on the hillā€
    A flash of brilliance. Once Gov. Winthropā€™s encapsulation of national purpose, Now brought up to date.
    Ditto to ughā€™s 2:21 Awesome
    ā€œ(as to health care) technology costs money. We have had enormous technological advances.ā€
    As I recall current health care costs are 40% paperwork. I did my fatherā€™s paperwork for his final three years, when he was living in a nursing facility (a good one, for ex-military). He received statements (not bills) from three different medicare-related agencies twice a week at least. Probably easily a dozen pounds of paper every month. This is healthy? and this is the expensive advanced technology driving up costs but improving quality? I always fervently thought not.
    ā€œYou are so dismissive about that, but most people work in order to buy things.ā€ Brings to mind my favorite Dubya sound bite: ā€œItā€™s your money. You paid for it.ā€
    ā€œObamaā€™s campaign is based more on a general malaise ā€“ nothing, nothing at all is right with the country.ā€ That must be his secret ingredient. All those freshly enthusiastic people following him like lemmingsā€” itā€™s all cleverly manipulated schadenfreude masquerading as blind hollow hope. Now how did I miss that?
    Mommy, Mommy! The audiophiles are here! Please, can I go out and play?
    I still have copies of Hi-Fi News from the early 80ā€™s. Most of you wonā€™t have heard, but you can buy a very good, ā€™Strine, turntable, very well built for 100k US, or at least it was before the dollar started dropping. You could put that together with a pair of Japanese amplifiers for around a quarter million…True. Though not normal. The viciously rich get the most impressive toys, yet another instance of plus Ƨa change. Something for your next idle cocktail party chatter allotment.
    I understand Iā€™m taking extreme open-thread liberties here, so I hope someoneā€™s smiling, or choking or something.
    Final off-topic query: Iā€™d love to see some bright mind around here do a riff on Pogo, and not just the ā€˜We have met the enemyā€™ line either. Walt Kellyā€™s skewering of McCarthy makes me wish he was still around to skewer the whole den of thieves stomping on our heads, hearts, and honor. His sunny irony (cynical on the outside, full of happy hope often frustrated within.)
    John? You seem to have a gift visible now and then that might suit you to parsing Pogoā€™s wealth.
    All hail.

  141. Interesting bit of infoporn in today’s paper. They list campaign donation totals broken out into 17 categories by donor type. McCain leads Obama in 5 of those categories:
    Gambling, casinos
    Lobbyists
    Oil and gas
    Pharmaceuticals and health products
    Telephone and utilities
    “Iā€™m the only one the special interests donā€™t give any money to”.
    -John “Mr. Integrity” McCain

  142. crappily mastered and overcompressed
    Basically, at 44khz sample rate, you’ve got to make a choice: do I antialias by gently rolling off at some reasonable frequency, and lose the high end, or do I antialias by putting a “brick wall” filter on the signal, preserving amplitude response up to the limit of hearing, but hosing phase response well into the audible range?
    I think early on, they chose the latter. Plus some other set of bad choices, that had early CD copies of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, for instance, sounding harsh and flat. It’s also entirely possible that the some early masters were preloaded with RIAA record equalization, which would have further messed up amplitude and phase.
    In any event, early CD copies were bad. Later copies were less bad, but every vinyl disk I have sounds better than its CD version. I’ve only got about 300 albums left, though, after the first wife swiped some of them.

  143. To answer felix’s bit on audiophile equipment, above: I’ve looked into audiophile,and as with most other things, there are levels and levels. If you’re looking for a system that images well, you can spend a few tens of thousands and have something very good indeed. I listened to the setup of a guy who had socked about that into a good system, on the cheap. Where possible, on clearance. A pair of quad electrostatics, Mark Levinson amplifier, can’t recall any of the rest. Basically the thing that did it for me, besides the fact that I wanted more out of life than just a good music system, was that he had more money invested in interconnects than I had in my entire system.
    So.
    I stick with what’s merely adequate. Maybe someday I’ll get around to repairing that ancient Yamaha integrated amp in my garage.

  145. Geez Slart, Iā€™d be more than happy with a rig like that.
    If I did have money, which has hardly ever been the case (being a proverbial improvident artist; the distinctive exception was 21 days on set as a nominal principal for Hollywood, running naked past Ray Romano and Gene Hackman, for which I got something north of 40k. Paid off my credit card, got a nice pair of shoes, and gave gifts. No improvement to my under-1k system); there are superior options for relatively small expenditures. Call it consumer porn, commodity fetishism, a spectator sport or a thought experiment; itā€™s pretty twisted but I suspect pretty common. Come the revolution they should maybe shoot me.
    Brick-wall filters, your second sort, seem to be pretty scarce these days. It seems almost impossible to keep them from ringing. And the algorithmistas have gotten more clever and wise to sonic flaws.
    Gosh, thanks. What fun.
    Perhaps you know that Tony Cordesman, the talking-head military-policy wonk is very serious about that stuff, and one of the better audiophile reviewers.
    Again, laud and honor to all.

  146. Gotta correct the consequence of inattentive syntax, Shouldā€™ve broken for a new Ā¶ at ā€˜Call itā€™. Meaning what it means to live in a world of idle speculation about but remote from visceral experience. There lies the twist.

  147. Hereā€™s my attempt to link Bob Dylan, Moodyā€™s, and the economy:
    You may be a preacher with your spiritual pride, You may be a city councilman taking bribes on the side, You may be workin’ in a barbershop, you may know how to cut hair, You may be somebody’s mistress, may be somebody’s heir.
    But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed. You’re gonna have to serve somebody.
    Moodyā€™s greatly influences the ability of governments and businesses to borrow money through their ratings services. They currently have a job opening for a ā€˜Financial Engineerā€™. MOODYS CORP is a publicly-owned company (NYSE: MCO), meaning it has institutional ownership. Side note: Moodyā€™s lost half of its market capitalization last year.
    Who does Moodyā€™s serve?

  148. Jay C: Of course, I also believe the Republicans, this election, are going to leave the “high road” and lofty themes to the top of the ticket: their real campaign is more likely to be an overflowing cloaca of fear, smear and raw hate. Man, how I would love to be proved wrong….
    Kudos for McCain:
    For the second time in as many days, Sen. John McCain was forced to rebuke members of his own party for over-the-top attacks on Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama.
    Will that last? I donā€™t know but Iā€™m happy to see this, and to see that he doesnā€™t care who he upsets with these rebukes.
    The candidateā€™s real position on NAFTA? (h/t CQ):
    Within the last month, a top staff member for Obama’s campaign telephoned Michael Wilson, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, and warned him that Obama would speak out against NAFTA, according to Canadian sources.
    The staff member reassured Wilson that the criticisms would only be campaign rhetoric, and should not be taken at face value.

  149. Will that last?
    Of course. McCain thus gets it both ways: his campaigners get to stir up the white racist vote against Obama, and people who don’t like being reminded how strongly the Republicans depend on the white racist vote get to think of McCain as a nice kinda guy who isn’t really racist.

  150. Brick-wall filters, your second sort, seem to be pretty scarce these days. It seems almost impossible to keep them from ringing. And the algorithmistas have gotten more clever and wise to sonic flaws.

    Well, I don’t know much about what’s actually in use, but I do know that there are brick-wall filters that have minimal ringing characteristics. The price you pay, though, is further destruction of phase information, which severely degrades imaging.

    Gosh, thanks. What fun.
    Perhaps you know that Tony Cordesman, the talking-head military-policy wonk is very serious about that stuff, and one of the better audiophile reviewers.
    Again, laud and honor to all.

    No, I didn’t know that. I don’t pay too much attention to audiophile mags, mostly because they’re talking about things I’d really love to have, after I’ve taken care of things like paying my house off, saving up for retirement and making sure my kids get through college. In short: I’ve got higher priorities.

    Call it consumer porn, commodity fetishism, a spectator sport or a thought experiment; itā€™s pretty twisted but I suspect pretty common.

    Along these lines, but not exactly what you were referring to, is what I regard as “prestige” equipment. You know: the high-dollar stuff that’s marketed to people who want it so they can have high-dollar stuff to impress their friends (or even themselves) with. Me, I’m more the kind of guy who’d dearly love to get my killer system by shopping around used equipment, but I think the days where you could score vintage audiophile EQ are mostly past. I had a chance to pick up a pair of Dynaco monoblocks about fifteen years ago; I’ve got more than adequate skills to upgrade them to something much more impressive, but that’s a time and money suck. And once I’d gotten the amps, I’d need a preamp, and then I’d really need better speakers. And there’s no such thing as vintage interconnects.
    That’s another glamour market: high-dollar wiring. People will pay big bucks to put high-end interconnects on their system, and they can’t even tell whether their system is imaging or not.
    I used to be highly sceptical about the whole imaging/soundstage bit, until I heard it for myself. On a system that images well, you can swap out a set of patch cables for a lesser set, and there’s a dramatic change in perceived position of the instruments. That’s, of course, given source material that’s recorded in such a way that that information is present in the first place. Studio rock is nearly all recorded in separate tracks, so there’s not much spatial information to begin with. Orchestral performances, on the other hand, you can picture exactly where that guy playing the triangle is standing.

  151. OCSteve:
    Yes, it’s certainly a positive that Sen. McCain has made moves to disavow at least some of the anti-Obama smear-mongering from “his” side – but I think this just reinforces my idea of how this year’s two-level campaign will play out. Josh Marshall lays it out pretty well HERE .

  152. Jes: Of course. McCain thus gets it both ways: his campaigners get to stir up the white racist vote against Obama, and people who don’t like being reminded how strongly the Republicans depend on the white racist vote get to think of McCain as a nice kinda guy who isn’t really racist.
    You seem to be on the same page as Josh Marshall who wrote much the same thing last night. The funny thing is that he said ā€œIf McCain really wants to repudiate this stuff, he can start with the Tennessee Republican party which dished all the slurs and smears about Obama being a Nation of Islam-loving anti-Semite, just today.ā€
    His post was at 11:40PM. But McCain had publicly done exactly that by 6:30PM. Joshā€™s post has no update to reflect that as of this morning.

  153. Jay C: Hah ā€“ x-posted with you on Josh. Same reply as to Jes though.
    To be clear on this: I hope that McCain runs as clean a campaign as possible. I hope that he continues to take the high road. I hope that once he is officially the candidate he does everything in his power to insure that the RNC and any 527s do as well.
    Then I hope he gets soundly defeated.

  156. Slarti: On a system that images well, you can swap out a set of patch cables for a lesser set, and there’s a dramatic change in perceived position of the instruments.
    If you can hear that, you might want to consider this challenge from professional skeptic James Randi. Heā€™s offering a cool $1M for anyone who can prove high end cables make a difference. I think heā€™s talking specifically about speaker cables and you said patch cables so maybe thatā€™s apples and oranges. (I donā€™t know anything about this and pretty much any system or media sounds the same to me.)

  157. OCSteve, whatever McCain says publicly, it’ll be how his campaign actually performs that’s the measure.
    Look at the Swift Boat Veterans: made up dirt about Kerry and pushed it at the media, claiming to be an independent group motivated only by their pure pure hatred, but which in fact turned out to have strong funding links to the Bush/Cheney campaign, if nothing that could legally jeopardize them as a “527”.
    When McCain says that “527s, which he has no control over” may put up ads or use rhetoric that McCain “does not support” – at least not publicly! – I think that’s fair warning that Obama is going to be Swiftboated. Much as McCain was himself, back when he was competing with Bush for the 2000 nomination.
    t McCain had publicly done exactly that by 6:30PM. Joshā€™s post has no update to reflect that as of this morning.
    Did McCain actually repudiate the Tennessee Republicans? Or did he just say the mealy-mouthed “gosh, I’m not the official nominee yet” bit you linked to?

  158. Jes: Just for a historical reference, McCain denounced the Swift Boat Veterans in no uncertain terms at the time.
    Did McCain actually repudiate the Tennessee Republicans?
    I canā€™t find a transcript of the presser but if you can listen to the video I linked it seems pretty clear to me that he did.

  159. Heā€™s offering a cool $1M for anyone who can prove high end cables make a difference.

    Interesting. It looks as if that offer has some built-in wiggle room: I’m betting that measureable differences between any two individual runs of speaker wire can be demonstrated, but the “significantly differentiate” wording points to some subjectivity in what constitutes “significant”.
    There also seems to be some underlying assumption that distortion is the dominant effect.
    I’m generally in agreement with the disdain toward audiophile cargo-cultism, but I also know what my ears tell me. Lacking an explanation for an effect isn’t the same as proof that there’s no effect at all.

  160. Just for a historical reference, McCain denounced the Swift Boat Veterans in no uncertain terms at the time.
    Yes, he did. ā€œIt was the same kind of deal that was pulled on me. The ad is dishonest and dishonourable.ā€ The Times, August 6, 2004
    But that was 2004, and this is now: in 2008, it’s: “always respected Karl Rove as one of the smart great political minds I think in American politics”.
    McCain now says he “bears no illwill” for Rove traducing himself and his adopted daughter in 2000. And he certainly didn’t do any “denouncing” of the Purple Heart bandaids at the RNC in 2004.
    (I just noticed: you linked to a FauxNews report which claims McCain condemned the Tennessee Republicans and which links the attempted smears of Obama to the MoveOn.org’s condemnation of General Petraeus: do you have a link to a real news report, as opposed to an RNC press release?)

  161. McCain now says he “bears no illwill” for Rove traducing himself and his adopted daughter in 2000. And he certainly didn’t do any “denouncing” of the Purple Heart bandaids at the RNC in 2004.
    Don’t worry. Just because McCain lacked the courage and convictions needed to stand up for his own family doesn’t mean that he won’t be able to stand up for America as President. I mean, who among us would not embrace vile monsters who publicly humiliated our families?

  162. Interesting. It looks as if that offer has some built-in wiggle room: I’m betting that measureable differences between any two individual runs of speaker wire can be demonstrated, but the “significantly differentiate” wording points to some subjectivity in what constitutes “significant”.
    nah. there’s no need to parse. the simple explanation as to why Randi’s been able to go for so long with nobody collecting that $1M is the only one that makes sense – nobody can do it. those super-high-end speaker wires are snake-oil.
    take a length of bulk radio-shack speaker wire and put it up against these $30K speaker wires. does it sound 2000 times better ?
    actually, that stuff looks like props for a white van scam.

  163. “When McCain says that “527s, which he has no control over” may put up ads or use rhetoric that McCain “does not support” – at least not publicly!”
    This is one of the many reasons why the McCain-Feingold act was so amazingly stupid. They pushed all sorts of formerly campaign-related groups into becoming non-campaign-related. This has reduced accountability, with completely predictable effect.

  164. OCSteve To be clear on this: I hope that McCain runs as clean a campaign as possible. I hope that he continues to take the high road. I hope that once he is officially the candidate he does everything in his power to insure that the RNC and any 527s do as well.
    Then I hope he gets soundly defeated.
    While in many ways I agree with you on that, I have a fear about your hoped-for scenario. Suppose McCain runs a clean campaign, stays on the high road, and runs on the issues and loses soundly to either Clinton or Obama. What kind of lesson do you think the Republican party machinery will learn from that? I don’t think they’ll learn a lesson about how people are sick of corruption, criminal Presidents, and all of the more numerous problems with the current Republican leadership. I think they’re more likely to learn “Well, McCain tried to ‘play nice’ and he lost. Full slime ahead!” and McCain’s losing by taking the high road would just re-enforce the Rove wing of the party.

  165. I had a chance to pick up a pair of Dynaco monoblocks . . .
    I’m generally in agreement with the disdain toward audiophile cargo-cultism
    I picked up a Dynoco system at a garage sale (preamp, amp that could go mono or stereo) and was really impressed by the “soft” tube sound (and it only cost $35!). One of the channels went out and I decided to sell the system to an audiophile that could fix it. He was not party of the “cargo-cultism” movement but more of a tinkerer. His subwoofer? An 8′ long or so 12″ diameter sonotube (those tubes for forming round concrete pads or posts) with an active crossover. Bass sounded cleaner and more realistic than anything I have heard since.
    My two cents on digital: I was a music major in college (performance major on trombone). Before digital, it was almost impossible to get the trombone to sound right. We worshipped the sound engineers that could do it. With the first digital tape recorders and a good set of mics positioned right anyone could get a decent sound. I know some of you love your vinyl and I agree that early cd’s were often harsh, flat, etc. And I’m know vinyl on a good system sounds better than an Ipod, but good digital typically sounds better, IMHO.

  166. Nate: What kind of lesson do you think the Republican party machinery will learn from that?
    I have a hope* that by 2012, so many senior people in the Republican Party will be in jail or will have had their political careers brought to an ignonimous end due to their having been connected with the crimes of the Bush administration, that the “Republican party machinery” will have to, and will, fundamentally change.
    *Yes, I do. It’s not a very strong hope, since I suspect that no matter that the Democratic candidate wins the election, the Republican candidate will be the one who takes office, just like in 2000 and 2004: and that should the Democratic candidate get to both win and take office, she or he will be under very strong pressure to do a President Ford on them all… but yeah: I have a tiny, frail, fragile hope that maybe justice will prevail.
    And honestly: if it doesn’t happen, and all the crooks are let off, the US has much worse problems than how the Republicans will campaign in 2012.

  168. Studio rock is nearly all recorded in separate tracks
    One of the best sounding recordings I ever participated in was a cheap, quick and dirty demo for a rock songwriter friend of mine. Guitar, bass, and drums, live. Separate rooms, but live.
    The engineer miked the drums by putting two microphones behind my head, angled down toward the kit and slightly in so that their fields overlapped. Basically, the mikes heard what my ears heard. It took five minutes to get the drum sounds dialed in (it often takes an hour), and they sounded great — live, natural, and huge.
    The engineer said he got the idea from an old Zepellin recording.
    Heā€™s offering a cool $1M for anyone who can prove high end cables make a difference
    Can I collect if I listen and say, “Yes, they sound better”? Or does the difference have to show up on a mechanical or electronic instrument of some sort?
    Randi will never have to pony up because there’s no way to prove, or disprove, phenomena that are part of the subjective human experience of hearing.
    Re: imaging —
    Has anyone checked out any of the small shop products like Decware, Njoe Tjoeb, etc? You can probably put a damned good basic tube system together for way less than $10K. Still not a small sum, but way less than many folks pay for other discretionary purchases (anyone here ride a Harley?). You just need really efficient speakers.
    I got a pair of Klipsch Cornwalls for a grand on ebay a few years ago, they sound great and you can make them sit up and bark with about 5 watts of power.
    Digital is incredibly convenient, and overall it’s pretty damned good, but sound, as a physical phenomenon, is inherently analog.
    Thanks –

  169. Randi will never have to pony up because there’s no way to prove, or disprove, phenomena that are part of the subjective human experience of hearing.
    there’s a whole lot of posts above this that talk about the differences in quality between analog and digital, DACs and filters, compression, etc.. clearly, there are objective differences.
    but the kind of performance people claim you can get from $30K speaker wires should be blindingly obvious. you shouldn’t need well-trained ears or a perfect listening environment. for that kind of cash, the difference should be night and day.
    but, the people who make and sell these cables consistently refuse to do a simple A/B blind test. that alone should tell you all you need to know about the cables themselves.
    on the other hand, knowing you paid $200/ft for your cables could cause you to enjoy (for real) the sound they deliver to your speakers more than $0.10/ft Radio Shack wire, in much the same way that you enjoy expensive wine more than you enjoy cheap wine.

  170. clearly, there are objective differences.
    No doubt. Or, at least, clearly there are ways to make an objective measure of some kinds of differences.
    I guess my point is that I’m not sure any of that matters all that much. If I hear a difference that the instruments don’t detect, I’m still hearing it. If the instruments detect a difference that I don’t hear, it doesn’t matter whether it exists or not.
    An example in the opposite direction:
    I once was in an audiophile shop and the salesman told me about a customer of his who had his house rewired so that all of his audio gear would be on a dedicated circuit. He didn’t want his musical experience to be compromised if, for instance, his refrigerator cycled on during a quiet passage.
    I’m not talking about hearing the refrigerator. That was handled by other structural work the guy had done on his house. I’m talking about hearing the effect of the momentary power drain from the fridge on the performance of the amplifier.
    I bet there are instruments sensitive enough to detect that. I doubt that anyone raised in our noisy modern society has ears good enough to hear it. Maybe a bat could.
    It’s all about what the ear hears. Or, more accurately, what the brain makes of what the ear hears.
    Thanks –

  171. Sit up and bark: yep, Klipsh Cornwalls are efficient, all right. They’re also furniture. The audio store on campus at school had a pair in zebrawood, IIRC; they were gorgeous as well as nice-sounding, but they did take up some floor space.
    They also had some higher-end stuff made by Beveridge that was even bigger, but those were about $20k a pair, more than 25 years ago. A couple of six-foot-tall electrostatic columns accompanied by a pair of low, round, 2′-diameter subwoofers.
    Ah, I just found it: Beveridge System 6. Shipping weight: 364 lbs.

  172. It sounds like those desiring super awesome old school systems are actually talking about systems with vacuum tube (as opposed to transistor) amplifiers…is that right? If so, um, why?

  173. Klipsh Cornwalls are efficient, all right. They’re also furniture.
    LOL.
    My wife resisted until she saw my buddy’s K-horns. After that, she figured she’d quit while she was ahead.
    is that right? If so, um, why?
    Yes. Analog.
    Thanks –

  174. but the kind of performance people claim you can get from $30K speaker wires should be blindingly obvious. you shouldn’t need well-trained ears or a perfect listening environment. for that kind of cash, the difference should be night and day.

    Do you think the untrained palate should be able to tell whether a $30 bottle of wine is “better” than a $3000 bottle of wine?
    1) it’s subjective, and 2) it depends on the level of training of the subjective sense in question.
    None of which is to say that $30k speaker wires are worth having.

  175. Transistor can still be analog. Tubes are supposed to be “warmer.” (Don’t ask me why.)
    I love music … a lot. But I really don’t get the whole audiophile thing. Old AC/DC on a boom box is like a $7 bottle of Yellowtail – excellent value for the price and far more than acceptable.

  176. Yes. Analog.

    Um…no. Transistor amps are analog, too. But possibly I’m misunderstanding; if so, please ‘splain.
    Basically, transistor amplifiers offer one range of characteristic “sounds”, while tube amps offer a range that’s…different. A bad transistor amp will sound harsh; a good transistor amp will sound quite neutral, and a tube amp will sound…warm, is the common descriptor. Nice, musical, lacking in rough edges that can be present in transistor amps. Probably there’s some frequency response differences.

  177. I think part of the difference has to do with clipping. Transistors will simply cut off the tops and bottoms of waveforms outside their range. I’m not sure what tubes do, but the limits are probably softer somehow.

  178. Not to derail the audiophile discussion, but something’s bothering me. I mentioned upthread that Hillary sought the endorsement of the Independence Party, the group she claimed to “reject” in the debate (NYT):

    Mrs. Clinton added that she welcomed the endorsement of the party, but said emphatically that she would not accept it if the party supported Patrick J. Buchanan for president. ”I cannot and will not as the price for any endorsement embrace or excuse those who use hateful rhetoric that separates and divides,” she said. ”So let me be just very clear: I will not run on a line with Pat Buchanan on the top of the ticket.”

    Seems like kind of a half-hearted rejection to me. Does someone a little more familiar with the campaign or NY politics have any insight on this?

  181. Transistor amps are analog, too. But possibly I’m misunderstanding; if so, please ‘splain
    No, at the level of the physics the misunderstanding is most likely mine.
    My general understanding of the difference in how music reproduced by tube and transistor systems is perceived is that tubes tend to distort by generating lower- and even-order harmonics, while transistors do so by generating odd- and higher-order harmonics. The harmonics generated by tube distortion, the claim goes, are harder for humans to detect, and are subjectively experienced as being pleasant, whereas those generated by transistors are subjectively experienced as harsh.
    So, you could have a tube system that is objectively not as good as a transistor system in terms of it’s distortion characteristics, but which yields a more enjoyable musical experience.
    All of that is over my head.
    Net/net, a lot of folks just like the sound of tube systems. In the context of the “imaging” discussion above, the “old school” tube systems — low power output, sometimes single ended triode with no feedback circuits — have great reputations for accurate spatial imaging and separation of individual voices and instruments. The reproduction of instrumental and vocal timbre is also claimed to be more accurate, by which I mean realistic, rather than clinical.
    It just sounds more like being in a particular space, listening to particular musicians make music on particular instruments.
    Make of it what you will.
    All of this, BTW, assumes that the recording you’re listening to has good information in it, which is quite often not the case.
    Thanks –

  182. This is one of the many reasons why the McCain-Feingold act was so amazingly stupid. They pushed all sorts of formerly campaign-related groups into becoming non-campaign-related. This has reduced accountability, with completely predictable effect.
    Illicit ties between the campaigns and the 527 groups have caused the worst abuses, so if you mean “formally non-campaign related and plausibly deniable,” I agree. As to authentically non-campaign-related groups, IMO the problem is not accountability but the fact that anybody listens and repeats the opinions of random bullsh**ers in the first place. The campaign/Party is properly not accountable for slander spread by unrelated people. But the media is doing little to sort wheat from chaff.
    I think the media reflexively assumes a) political parties, being repeat players who need to get along to some extent with the other side and need to build up voter trust, will refrain from complete fabrication, and b) a publicity blitz regarding the campaign is in some way controlled or controllable by the campaign — and therefore to be taken seriously. Neither assumption was ever justified, and McCain Feingold really tore up the second one.
    So we’re back to old-fashioned yellow journalism, where anybody with enough money to buy a soapbox can influence the election. Supposedly, this is good for democracy, and, who knows, maybe it will be if the electorate ever catches up to the reality. The press could do a lot more to keep the game honest, and even more interesting, by following the 527s’ money and principals, and the law has enough disclosure provisions that it would be pretty easy — but given the stenographic nature of what now passes for journalism, it’s not happening.

  183. Jes: do you have a link to a real news report, as opposed to an RNC press release?)
    Itā€™s where I ended up watching the video (linked from where I donā€™t even recall now). In a quick look around I donā€™t see it posted anywhere else. Maybe no one else thought it newsworthy. (Surprise)
    Do you suppose they manipulated the video? If you look real close is that Rove behind the curtain with his hand up McCainā€™s a**? If it was anonymously posted on YouTube would it have more validity? Dismiss it because itā€™s on Fox, fine. Yet Iā€™m supposed to accept the mind-reading from you, Marshall, digby, etc. that this is all just wink wink nudge nudge. No problem, weā€™ll see how it plays out. If Iā€™m wrong it wonā€™t be the first time Iā€™ve misjudged a Republican candidateā€¦
    Nate: I think they’re more likely to learn “Well, McCain tried to ‘play nice’ and he lost. Full slime ahead!” and McCain’s losing by taking the high road would just re-enforce the Rove wing of the party.
    Youā€™re probably right. Iā€™d still like to see it. If I had McCainā€™s ear for 5 minutes I tell him dude ā€“ you paid your dues and Iā€™m happy you got your shot ā€“ but face it, you donā€™t have a chance in hell. The last best thing you can do here is to try to restore some integrity to the brand and go out with class. (I donā€™t actually want a pony ā€“ I have no place to keep a pony.)
    russell: Can I collect if I listen and say, “Yes, they sound better”? Or does the difference have to show up on a mechanical or electronic instrument of some sort?
    I do believe that is how it works. You just have to consistently identify the more expensive cable in double-blind tests. As Slarti noted there are open details to be worked out and agreed to but so far no one has collected.

  184. Do you think the untrained palate should be able to tell whether a $30 bottle of wine is “better” than a $3000 bottle of wine?
    “better” is certainly subjective. but, an A/B test, blindfolded, two glasses of wine – even a person who has never tasted wine before in his life should be able to notice that the two wines are different. assuming the two bottles actually contain different wine…
    audiophile cable scammers refuse to even submit their product to a simple test for difference.

  186. George Will went with the McCain bank loan story.
    ouch, he sure did!

      Although his campaign is run by lobbyists; and although his dealings with lobbyists have generated what he, when judging the behavior of others, calls corrupt appearances; and although he has profited from his manipulation of the taxpayer-funding system that is celebrated by reformers — still, he probably is innocent of insincerity. Such is his towering moral vanity, he seems sincerely to consider it theoretically impossible for him to commit the offenses of appearances that he incessantly ascribes to others.

    tee hee.

  187. Slarti,
    Thanks for the clarification. Do you know if anyone has characterized the relevant difference between transistor and tube based audio amplifiers in terms of frequency response? Because I know how to build transistor amplifiers to match just about any frequency response…or do you suspect that the relevant differences can not be well characterized by frequency response?

  188. Dismiss it because itā€™s on Fox, fine.
    Yeah. Anything on the Republican Party’s TV channel is automatically suspect. If you can’t find it on a news channel, it’s probably not worth it.
    Yet Iā€™m supposed to accept the mind-reading from you, Marshall, digby, etc. that this is all just wink wink nudge nudge.
    I refer you to my previous comment. Mindreading is not the process involved.

  190. I’ll have to get back to you on frequency response, Turbulence. Normally tube amps are somewhat lacking in low-end response as compared with transistor amps, but that might be a load impedance effect. There’s a certain tendency to think of amplifiers as a stand-alone system, as opposed to something that’s working to deliver flat frequency response to a complex load like a speaker.
    You can, in fact, build wideband transistor amplifiers, but building them wideband and open-loop is a different proposal. My understanding is that feedback does some things to music’s information content that’s not conducive to imaging, but I haven’t given that a whole lot of thought lately, and would have to go back over it again. So, for all you or I know right now, minimizing feedback in audiophile amps may or may not be a good thing.

  191. Slarti,
    Feedback not a good thing?! I know engineers that would kill you dead upon hearing such statements.
    I’ve never heard this idea about feedback designs altering the information content…that sounds intriguing. I’m used to thinking of feedback as a set of design tools that allow you to go from the crappy open-loop frequency response of the system to a much improved closed loop frequency response. I suppose if you think that there’s some property of the sound that’s not well characterized by frequency response techniques, then I could imagine an amplifier that used feedback would do bad things to the sound.

  193. Why does the U.S. military hate the U.S.?
    The traitors are everywhere. I say we search every closet in America, to find all the hidden Muslim garb out there. It’s the only way to be sure. And who would object unless they had something to hide?

  194. Such is his towering moral vanity, he seems sincerely to consider it theoretically impossible for him to commit the offenses of appearances that he incessantly ascribes to others.
    Youch! That’s going to leave a mark!

  195. One of the best sounding recordings I ever participated in was a cheap, quick and dirty demo for a rock songwriter friend of mine. Guitar, bass, and drums, live. Separate rooms, but live.
    That reminds me: Frank Black, late of the Pixies, now does all his recording with his band The Catholics live to two-track stereo. I don’t know what their particular microphone/pre-mix setup is — and it’s probably a little more in-depth than what you described — but it all goes right to a two-track master. And it sounds great.

  196. one of the best sounding (IMHO) rock records of all time, the Cowboy Junkies The Trinity Session, was done to a single stereo mic for the band, and a PA for the vocals.

  197. from russell: ā€œ… clearly there are ways to make an objective measure of some kinds of differences.ā€
    This was one of the central issues in audiophile discussions that used to intrigue me most, leading to my comment about thought experiments and idle speculation. Part of my ingrained hippie schadenfreude, taking pleasure in the reductionist dogmatists being exposed as bears of very little willingness to grasp their perceptual limitations and the tunnel vision required to imagine that they already had everything figured out and under control. Failed blind pride and all. Of course, that was twenty-five years ago. The reductionists have lost some ground since then, or rather theyā€™ve taken to heart their limitations and pursued their task wirh more subtlety. It may signify an underexamined cultural shift following upon the rise of chaos theory and its cognates; indeterminacy and unexpected outcomes have altered the defining cultural context.
    Turbulence; feedback in this reading is a kludge destructive to phase relationships, and while it still plays a part in a number of admirable designs, itā€™s still arguably a workaround, a remedy for deficiencies in the underlying design.
    Vis-Ć”-vis tube vs transistor, the question points up the degree to which both art and aesthetics play a part in the audio world just as they do elsewhere. Art here refers to the part imaginative insight plays in good design. The underlying idea is that the really rich soil is the least tilled, where the intertwined intricacies of nature have been left alone to work their magic. The lone artist/outsider engineer finding his/her way past the obstacles to creative imagination and discovery. Pretensions to expert technical mastery are blinders limiting access to the larger world. (Not at all unlike the dreadful calamities wrought by technocrats who thought they had mastery of all things fiscal or political. In my book leading exemplars are McNamare internationalizing the reach of the US arms industry to leverage the defense budget, and Brzezinski setting up the mujahideen, which he still thinks was a great idea.) Tubes have the appeal of (well-heeled) outsider status, and to the degree transistor design is confined to familiar paths its scope for potential innovation is limited.
    In practice, as you note, each may be implemented to produce nearly identical high-end results, and both starting points have been adopted by aspiring visionaries.
    Aesthetics pretty clearly favor the retro-futuristic chic of softly glowing tubes, undoubtedly a factor influencing peripheral perception and pleasure.
    Emphatic agreement on the bottom line, Spending lots and lots and lots of money on an esoteric pleasure offends my puritan-bred soul. (Those of you unfamiliar with the discourse will be unaware that the purest experience, due to the constraints of acoustics, demands that the listener be placed precisely to enjoy the potential benefits, such that the illusion of reality can collapse with a slight head movement. In this sense itā€™s essentially a privileged solitary pursuit.) Thatā€™s why I would accept the justice of finding myself before the firing squad. Just, in a world of diversions thereā€™s pleasure in implicit resonances in unexpected places. Intricacies echoing each other across unexplored territory. Itā€™s my only justification for what otherwise can only be seen as extensive time-wasting.

  198. Aesthetics pretty clearly favor the retro-futuristic chic of softly glowing tubes, undoubtedly a factor influencing peripheral perception and pleasure.
    To kind of get this back to brass tacks, this guy’s stuff has kind of piqued my interest. His gear is ugly as hell, but apparently it sounds great. You can get in the game for about $700.00, you just need to have extremely efficient speakers.
    At the risk of beating a very dead horse into a pulp, I think if you can hear a difference between vinyl and digital, and you prefer the former, tubes are worth a listen. It’s not just trendiness, there’s a difference in the sound.
    More parting shots:
    On the NAFTA thing, I recognize and appreciate Sebastian’s point that all of the various economic harms Thullen and others have cited can’t be laid at the feet of NAFTA. That alone, however, leaves the harms themselves unaddressed. So, for my money, advantage Thullen.
    As an aside, is it just me, or will anyone else be happy as a clam when this damned election is over? Only eight more months to go…
    Regarding Buckley, no doubt he was head and shoulders above the rabid yahoos that fill the ranks of conservative punditry these days. Witty and erudite as he was, however, he always struck me as an apologist for privilege.
    In any case, RIP Bill Buckley.

  199. feedback in this reading is a kludge destructive to phase relationships, and while it still plays a part in a number of admirable designs, itā€™s still arguably a workaround, a remedy for deficiencies in the underlying design.
    No. Feedback is not a design kludge, it is a vital tool. Almost every serious electrical circuit today relies heavily on feedback. Without feedback design, essentially all electronic technology that we have DOES NOT WORK. And that makes sense; biological systems are just as reliant on feedback. Without feedback, we die instantly and our toys soon follow.
    In amplifiers, feedback allows the designer to trade off resources that are abundant in exchange for resources that are scarce. For example, raw gain is often reduced in order to make the circuit perform reliably over a range of operating temperatures; it would not do to have one’s amplifier’s behavior change dramatically with the weather.
    Feedback is what allows our systems to perform even though the external environment may change (for example, electrical properties change dramatically when circuits heat up, which they do in the normal course of operation), the internal components may degrade significantly, (compare the beta on a transistor that’s been operating for a few years over the course of its lifetime), the internal components may not be perfectly matched (many designs require pairs of components to perform identically), or when the internal components don’t match what was expected (is is impossible to manufacture components to extremely high levels of precision). Such tradeoffs make perfect sense. We can’t use raw gain of 10,000 in any event.
    This stuff about phase relationships seems very muddled. All amplifiers, whether or not they internally use feedback, will alter phase. Feedback allows designers increased flexibility to determine at what frequencies phase changes are induced and how severe they are. In principle, there’s no reason that the brunt of a feedback amplifier’s phase delay can’t be introduced in frequencies above the range of human hearing where the amplifier is attenuating anyway.
    The underlying idea is that the really rich soil is the least tilled, where the intertwined intricacies of nature have been left alone to work their magic. The lone artist/outsider engineer finding his/her way past the obstacles to creative imagination and discovery. Pretensions to expert technical mastery are blinders limiting access to the larger world….Tubes have the appeal of (well-heeled) outsider status, and to the degree transistor design is confined to familiar paths its scope for potential innovation is limited.
    This seems…wrong. Good electrical engineers can design both tube and transistor based amplifiers. The skill sets are identical; its just a matter of using a different set of constitutive relations. That’s why the exam for my class in advanced transistor circuit design contained a long question that said “there is an awesome new technology called vacuum tubes; here are the constitutive relations; even though we’ve never discussed tubes before, design an amplifier that meets the following specifications…”. The reason why we don’t design tube amplifiers today is because they’re impractical for most applications.
    Also, tube based audio amplifier design is hardly the province of the lone wolves of electrical engineering; there are fairly few reasonable circuit topologies in this domain. Anyone who is producing a tube based amplifier will end up with a design that will look familiar if not recognizable to good EEs.
    Finally, if you’re working on power amplifiers, I strongly recommend that you stick to the pretensions of technical mastery. When dealing with enough electricity to kill you, nothing helps like technical mastery.
    It seems like you’re trying to impute this area with a lot more romanticism than the underlying reality can support.

  200. I do some engineering on a 24-track digital system == long story, I fell into it by accident and then further by accident found myself singing harmonies and now playing rhythm acoustic guitar — at any rate my approach to engineering is that I know it when I hear it and further, I’m a little like John Lennon: How should the song sound? It should sound purple from deep in the forest sung by wombats wearing scarves, or something.
    Digital … not warm …. though we stumble on ways to make it warmer, but very convenient. Just plug in and go. I’ve never worked with tubes and tape.
    Our very quick mixes are embarrassingly good, but that doesn’t stop us from mixing some stuff 700 times, with little extra improvement, it seems.
    I really need to get back to recording. Life has interrupted the music the past two years or so.
    Russell: my point regarding free trade was not so much that so many bad things were caused by NAFTA, but rather that the disruptions caused to individuals by job loss for whatever reason could be so much better handled by society, additudinally speaking.
    Creative destruction, free trade, and the invisible hand wouldn’t have such poor reputations if society didn’t believe compensating for the downsides in a very systematic and, yup, expensive way wasn’t somehow a matter of questionable, commie-inspired behavior.
    Yeah, yeah, we’ve made strides but the folks who fire and layoff generally fight every compensatory measure tooth and nail.
    Telling a guy to “get a job” when he just lost a job seems to call the worker’s work ethic into question. He had a job. The firing or laying-off is the problem; not the worker’s new condition of being without work.
    felix culpa:
    I don’t know. Your drugs seem to be working pretty well. šŸ˜‰
    re Buckley: one thing he never did was apologize for privilege, even though it might have been nice occasionally if he had. The actor who played Thurston Howell III, I forget his name, on Gilligan’s Island reportedly modeled his upper crust preppy New England accent on Buckley and his school chums.
    I’ve known many people from that social milieu. To this day, they all have nicknames like Waddy and Stoddy and Blippy, and Sootie, and, well, you get the idea.
    Not a Bob among them.

  201. thread still open ….
    We have 8 months until the election and Saddam Vladimir Obama is already a Commie, a Muslim terrorist, a Manchurian candidate, a 1960s radical underground yippie SDS Symbionese Liberation Army bombthrower living on the Manson Ranch, and a vegetarian transsexual IRS agent with a 666 tattooed under his Blank Panther afro.
    Frankly, I hope he turns out to be all of those, just to give folks what they want ……. their air-conditioned nightmare who knocks on the door in the middle of the night.

  202. “The actor who played Thurston Howell III, I forget his name,”
    Jim Backus. Don’t have to look that one up. Or Alan Hale, Jr.
    But, hey, I liked his dad, too. Now, there was a guy in a lot of films.
    And just in the last few weeks I’ve seen him again in (again) It Happened One Night (about the billionth time), The Lost Patrol, Captains of the Clouds, This Is The Army, and The Inspector General.
    Well, parts of them, anyway.
    John, I’m thinking there may be a killing to be made in selling Muslim garb. Or at least, maybe, financial intruments made up of chopped futures in Muslim garb, with banana options on top, and whipped interest rates, the latest variant on variable rates — whipped rates never stop changing for even a second; but they’re just a stopgap until we move on to the upcoming Heisenberg Interest Rate Regime.
    Whaddya think?

  203. Yeah, still open!
    Turbulence, youā€™ve seen through me. Itā€™s a sort of puritan romanticism channeled by commodity fetishism.
    As you have seen I have no engineering background. I admire what engineers do, and wouldnā€™t want to try doing without them. That would be seriously stupid.
    I suppose Iā€™ve swallowed the idea that the best thinking comes outside the box, and the smaller engineering teams are the most innovative. Iā€™m sure youā€™ve encountered that meme many times.
    Is it useful to distinguish between positive and negative feedback? A widespread conviction exists in the audiophile conversation that zero negative feedback is a defining ideal.
    While Iā€™m allowed to continue wandering in obscurities, some of the most interesting designs, at price levels ranging from (relatively) inexpensive to exorbitant employ rechargeable batteries. A good example here. They by report always produce superior sound, presumably due to purity of the power source relative to rectified normal (polluted) electrical service. Especially given its green side, I can see it becoming more widespread.
    Re NAFTA, here in Canada concerned citizens see it as only benefiting the US, and the really concerned citizens see it as a tool in the continuing effort to annex Canada to the US. FWIW.

  204. Gee Gary, I have so much trouble getting it right.
    Here I was thinking it was the Hindenburg Interest Rate Regime.
    Or maybe it was the Hindenburg Error Rate Regime. Gotta work on the acronym. Iā€™d like to end up with HEIL. Or maybe HELL.

  205. Russell: my point regarding free trade was not so much that so many bad things were caused by NAFTA, but rather that the disruptions caused to individuals by job loss for whatever reason could be so much better handled by society, additudinally speaking.
    Yes, I definitely got that, and agree. While Seb’s factual points about NAFTA were well taken, he failed to address this basic, necessary point.
    I’ve known many people from that social milieu. To this day, they all have nicknames like Waddy and Stoddy and Blippy, and Sootie, and, well, you get the idea.
    I have the good fortune to live in a town that is surrounded by water on three sides, that has one good if smallish harbor of its own, and that shares another with an adjoining town.
    Unfortunately, this attracts a disproportionate number of the kinds of folks you describe. If you have more money than sense, apparently the first thing you must do is get a boat. Preferably a sailboat, so you can not only squander all of your money, but your time as well.
    For some reason, none of these folks are able to unclench their jaws when they talk. I suspect a genetic marker of some kind is involved, no doubt the product of generations of inbreeding.
    Hope your time frees up enough to play some music soon!
    Thanks –

  206. Gary: Why does the U.S. military hate the U.S.?
    From your link:
    At the time, critics ridiculed Colonel Moe as an administration apologist. But in recent weeks, some of them have described him in nearly heroic terms.
    Imagine that. Same man – a stooge or a hero depending on whether he sides with you or not (not you personally).

  207. No. Feedback is not a design kludge, it is a vital tool. Almost every serious electrical circuit today relies heavily on feedback. Without feedback design, essentially all electronic technology that we have DOES NOT WORK. And that makes sense; biological systems are just as reliant on feedback. Without feedback, we die instantly and our toys soon follow.

    True, to an extent.
    Feedback is simply a way to make a relatively narrowband amplifier circuit into a wideband circuit. Gain-bandwidth product is conserved, so you take a high-gain, narrowband amplifier design, wrap a feedback loop around it, and get a lower-gain, wideband design.
    Again, I can’t recall exactly what the problem with that is, other than it introduces additional, inherently nonideal circuit elements into the amplifier. It’s probably something most engineers would agree on, though, that if you can achieve the desired gain and bandwidth without feedback, you wouldn’t want to wrap a feedback loop around it.
    In an ideal sense, you can achieve fantastic gain, bandwidth, and signal to noise ratios by applying a feedback loop to, for instance, a mass-produced JFET or MOSFET operational amplifier. Yet, this is almsot never done in middle-to-high-end audio. There’s probably a decent reason for that, but as I said, I can’t recall just now what that is.
    I’m kind of out of this discussion for a bit, because I’m godawfully busy, but I’ll give it some thought. Perhaps the Gods of HOCB can kick open a thread for further discussion.

  208. į½¢ Ļ€į½¹Ļ€ĪæĪ¹, Īæį¼·ĪæĪ½ Ī“į½µ Ī½Ļ… ĪøĪµĪæį½ŗĻ‚ Ī²ĻĪæĻ„Īæį½¶ Ī±į¼°Ļ„Ī¹į½¹Ļ‰Ī½Ļ„Ī±Ī¹
    One of the gods of HOCB, though a bit busy trying to shake the effects of the Kirin ambrosia he overimbibed in, heard your supplication

  209. OCSteve: Imagine that. Same man – a stooge or a hero depending on whether he sides with you or not (not you personally).
    Do you want to reconsider that comment, or just let it stand?
    Colonel Morris D. Davis used to support the system of extra-judicial detention and kangaroo courts, at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.
    He’s changed his mind about that. (Sounds like a crisis of conscience to me – in fact, from all I’ve read about his decision to resign and speak out, it sounds like the crap finally piled up till he couldn’t stand it any more.)
    Yet you’re just seeing this as two political sides – no moral difference between the two? You sure you don’t want to reconsider your comments?

  211. I should add that I don’t think Slarti is blaming anyone, I just like the notion of the first thing out of Zeus’ mouth is complaining about what a pain in the butt people can be (book 1, Odyssey)

  213. “Russell: my point regarding free trade was not so much that so many bad things were caused by NAFTA, but rather that the disruptions caused to individuals by job loss for whatever reason could be so much better handled by society, additudinally speaking.”
    and;
    “While Seb’s factual points about NAFTA were well taken, he failed to address this basic, necessary point.”
    Well that is a totally different point than whether or not NAFTA was a good thing/should be renegotiated. If you want to talk about this other point, I’m all for it.
    But NAFTA doesn’t need to be renegotiated and free trade doesn’t need to be strongly questioned for that to happen. We can unilaterally decide to help out workers that are actively harmed by it. The number is very small so if we wanted to spend some fairly intense time/money on the project we certainly could. We would probably disagree about the form it should take (I would opt for a very flexible retraining program–i.e. the government would pay for a year of training but not be too choosy about what training was taken but I would not be all about ‘saving Detroit’ or something like that and I would want it to be closely time-limited. If your company fails 20 years after NAFTA comes into effect that isn’t the same as if it has problems 5 years later). But that has absolutely nothing to do with a need to renegotiate NAFTA or free trade agreements. That is a wholly internal matter (and one which has a largely exaggerated impact anyway).

  214. If I’d have known I was going to be quoted TWICE, I might have spelled “attitudinally” correctly, or maybe even used a real word.

  216. hey all you HTML people, want to see some high-grade web site security in action?
    LOL. Or maybe, “Uh oh!”.
    So nice of them to include a comment in case the field names weren’t enough of a tip.
    Remind me of this next time I go on about how effective government can be. šŸ™
    Thanks –

  217. Of course, it’s a .com address; not a .gov. Are you sure it’s for real?
    Not that I wouldn’t believe it.

  219. it’s real. but it’s for a company which publishes info about getting govt contracts. not really a govt. agency – though they’re trying hard to look like they are.

  223. go to this this page on the “Federal Suppliers Guide” site and do a View Source
    I tried their valid UserID and Password and got “Document Not Found”. So bad protection for a non-existant web-page? Sounds like a wash to me.

  224. Jes: He’s changed his mind about that. (Sounds like a crisis of conscience to me – in fact, from all I’ve read about his decision to resign and speak out, it sounds like the crap finally piled up till he couldn’t stand it any more.)
    I didnā€™t read it that way:
    Then in October he had a dispute with his boss, a general. Ever since, he has been one of those critics who will not go away: a former top insider, with broad shoulders and a well-pressed uniform, willing to turn on the system he helped run.
    I read it as he got pi**ed at his boss and now relishes giving him grief. I understand that. But I donā€™t give him credit for ā€œa crisis of conscienceā€. Which is why I pinged the folks who suddenly think he is a hero.

  225. “I read it as he got pi**ed at his boss and now relishes giving him grief.”
    Notice, OCSteve, that you’ve been given access to tons of information about the issues at stake in the Guantanamo prosecutions.
    With no other information, you translate this into a petty personal beef, and reduce it to nothing more than an interpersonal conflict, no more important than how neat someone keeps their desk.
    And you completely ignore the issues of fact. You choose to address them by not.
    But you’re not engaging in any kind of double standard. By ignoring the facts, and going with your gut, you’re just calling ’em as you see ’em.
    No matter that there’s absolutely no evidence for your reading that this is primarily a personality conflict, and that there’s plenty of evidence about the actual memos, legalities, directives, and legal and moral conflicts as to what is right.
    It’s just what you feel more comfortable assuming: that it’s a petty personality conflict, and the issues are just a smokescreen, not even worth mentioning.
    That’s natural; it doesn’t cause any cognitive dissonance, or any uncomfortable need to consider whether the government is doing anything wrong, as regards all the detailed facts Col. Davis has outlined. It lets you dismiss the whole thing comfortably.
    But it’s projection, not fact, that lets you do that.

  226. But I donā€™t give him credit for ā€œa crisis of conscienceā€
    Even though you know what he had a dispute with his boss about?
    Davis said: ā€œI said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process. At which point, [Haynesā€™s] eyes got wide and he said, ā€˜Wait a minute, we canā€™t have acquittals. If weā€™ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We canā€™t have acquittals, weā€™ve got to have convictions.ā€™”
    Just someone who got angry with his boss – a mere matter of personality conflict, nothing to do with the rights and wrongs – and now “relishes giving him grief” – because you really don’t think there could be anyone who objects to a statement like that out of conscience?
    OCSteve, are you really taking the position it looks like you’re taking?

  227. Gary and Jes: You know what ā€“ youā€™re right and Iā€™m wrong. At least Iā€™m wrong with offering my opinion on an article after one read through it. Piss on it. Life is too short.

  228. Emphatic agreement on the bottom line, Spending lots and lots and lots of money on an esoteric pleasure offends my puritan-bred soul. (Those of you unfamiliar with the discourse will be unaware that the purest experience, due to the constraints of acoustics, demands that the listener be placed precisely to enjoy the potential benefits, such that the illusion of reality can collapse with a slight head movement. In this sense itā€™s essentially a privileged solitary pursuit.)
    As I have aged, my hearing has deteriorated to the point where my ears are no longer good enough to discern the fine differences. Which is nice, because I no longer find myself tempted by high-end audio equipment.

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