West Wittering – shot on film. I’m not remotely a landscape photographer (I’m almost exclusively a portrait photographer) and I guess this otherwise dull images demonstrates that but I do like the textures and the painterly quality and it’s a useful exercise in learning how film records the light on the landscape.

Nonce

Nonce is slang for ‘paedophile’ and a paedophile is someone who is sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children. Virginia Guiffre was 17 when the alleged incident took place and therefore not pre-pubescent.

The crime, where one might have been committed, is solely confined to whether Prince Andrew knew full well she was there against her will and for the sole purpose of sex. In order for Andrew to be guilty of something the court would have to prove that he knew full well she was there against her will and therefore a) unable to give consent, making this a rape case and b) there for the purposes of sex, making this a sex trafficing case. Both would have to be proved in court, which would be very difficult to achieve.

As to whether he is a ‘nonce’, we have words for very deeply problematic things like being sexually attracted to children for a good reason; precisely because these things are deeply problematic. Andrews behaviour is certainly problematic but it’s not paedophilic. We should be careful with the way we use words and even more careful with the careless expansion of their meaning.

someone just outed themselves as not the n00b they claimed to be…

😉

Paging Elf-in-safety to the thread

er, yeah, no

hifi is sold in exactly the same way as fad diets or politicians or self improvement schemes, with voodoo and hand waving mysticism

@mrmonkfinger there’s always one post like this in a hifi post on STW so well done for being this thread’s doubting Thomas.

What I don’t understand is why people like you feel it so important to dismiss everyone else’s experience as delusion. It’s like any time religion gets brought up here and everyone races to explain it as mass hysteria (like COVID 😂); why not just accept your own intransigence and allow others who can hear huge differences in sound reproduction to enjoy their more informed experience; why the need to unilaterally dismiss us as the deranged ones; do we threaten you that much?

I’ve been blissfully happy since I was able to get a decent stereo back in my life. After my divorce, I set aside £30k from the house sale to buy the best damn system I could afford. Bit by bit it’s been built tweaked and improved and my new partner, a huge music fan but not someone who has ever been exposed to good quality sound before, has heard the subtle and often not so subtle, improvements that every iteration has yielded, even down to the use of graphite cones under the amps (which was a quite dramatic improvement but then the amps are valve based and so more prone to mechanical vibration effects).

Source continues to be a hugely interesting area for development. Because I was starting from scratch I went with a server based front end; I ripped about 600 albums to bit perfect 44/16 copies and bought a high end custom built music server. This was the last box to be delivered and having replaced my MacBook Pro on serving duties, the improvement was vast.

But what has impressed me the most are the high res files you can bow buy and download (downloaded still sounds considerably better than streamed) from places like Qobuz. 196/24 is a dramatic lift but DSD256 is a whole order of magnitude better again (when the music is recorded in DSD of course, which very little is currently apart from classical re-recordings).

I’m at the point now where other than user experience (which remains hugely important for analogue) there is little if no benefit from using vinyl over digital if your reason for doing so is quality of sound.

stopping routes of transmission remains a key aspect of controlling the virus at ‘manageable’ levels

It may be, but supressing people is far more dangerous now than supressing the virus. If people are scared then they have the choice to stay home and shut themselves way. The damage that controls imposed on society causes should not be unerestimaged, not least to children.

They are the single biggest casualty of all this; we have a tidal wave of mental health hitting us. In my home town, across two school, there have been four suicides in the last 18 months. I have TWO friends whose kids have tried repeatedly to kills themselves (and CAMS have done nothing, and I really mean the square root of eff all!)

Whatever we did we made a monstrous mistake closing the schools. As for the rest of the controls, I think the vast majority of people from the third quartile or higher on trait neuroticism are done with the controls. Any other residual anxiety is therefore your own problem.

It’s not always as clear cut as our current simplistic “black or white” social media led world view would like it to be.

I completely agree and that was the point I was making. You can’t automatically assume that the offensive joke is sanctioning the thing being made fun of but you also cannot automatically assume that it’s not. In the 70s it is easy to see that a lot of comedy was made at the expense of those marginalised groups (which is why they were marginalised back then) and yet the fact that there were groups we poked fun at is one of the ways we were able to recognise the wrong we were doing.

It’s not the first Holocaust joke he’s told. He’s told one before about a school mate getting caught masturbating in the showers on a school trip, with the punchline subsequently revealing that school trip was to Auschwitz. That joke came at the end of of string of increasingly (potentially) offensive jokes that he was telling to test the limit as to what you can joke about. When he told that joke, everyone laughed, although it was the kind of laugh bourne as much out of shock for having told something so horrendously offensive that all you can do is laugh.

Nothing should be offlimits for comedy and there was a lot of push back from the comedy community when the UK passed laws making it an offence to tell certain jokes based on religion etc.

Jokes are societies (safe) way of exploring how it really feels about a thing. The mistake people make, when they found a joke offensive, is to think that that automatically means the comedian is sanctioning the thing they are making fun of. Of course if they are doing that then that’s deeply problematic and in our history we have found some comedians to be guilty of that. Bernard Manning springs to mind.

But the role of the ‘jester’ in playing back to society its moires, foibles, values and hypocricies is hugely important part of maintaining cohesion and for reinforcing our values. Jimmy Carr treads a fine line and for sure he will upset a lot of people. But until I think he really does mean it when he says that killing the gypisies was a good thing, I will be OK with him telling that joke.

Out of interest, other than supporting a kid, whats been the factors that have swung it away from an even split?

As above, if there is a very substantial difference in what was brough to the marriage in the first place then there may be a case to adjust things there, but the difference has to be significant; £100k isn’t considered significant in a marraige of 14 years for example and the longer the marriage has been in place, the less likely you are to successfully make that case.

But there are valid reasons why it might not be 50/50 and the key here is the way the family courts rule on financial settlements. Their guiding principle is worded as ‘the needs of both parties must be sufficiently met’; if one party were for example 60 and with very little pension savings and and the other were say 40 but with substantial pension savings, then the older party would likely get a more generous settlement to compensate for the fact that they simply cannot earn the pension they need to sustain them. This is why my split was slighyly in my favour – I am slightly older than my ex.

The one overwhelming piece of advice I would reiterate time and time again however is this:

Do your best to be the very best ex they could possibly hope for (even if no one ever hopes to have a good ex!) and if there are kids involved, then this times a thousand.

It’s very easy to give way to malice, spite and hate but in the end those negative emotions will chew you up and make you very unhappy.

I’m very fotunate that having adopted this approach myself (and with two young children that spend exactly equal time with myself and my ex) my ex also responded in kind. It took a while but she did eventually and we are co-parenting now better than we ever did as a couple!

He’s having to pay an actuary a few grand to sort his pension stuff out plus of course his and her solicitors fees as he’s taken the wrap for the divorce as the ‘no fault’ rule isn’t in play yet.

He doesn’t have to pay her fees at all; if he is then he’s doing it voluntarily. Same goes for the actuarial valuation. Of course more importantly ‘HE’ isn’t paying for anything period; ‘THEY’ are paying for it all from their share of the total pot. If a marriage has been for longer than say 12 years, all assets are marital and thus shared.
My ex and I took credit cards out with zero percent on new spend and paid our fees on those until the family home was sold. It cost me about £17,000 all in.

In the first meeting I suggested 50/50; her lawyer (who was in the room at the same time as mine as we went down the collaborative route) said she should take it. Mine said I might well be entitled to more and I should consider exploring that. I reiterated that for the sake ease and saving money I would still table 50/50 but my ex insisted on trying to keep her pension out of the equation.

In the end we settled 52/48 in my favour. 🤦‍♂️

The tricky thing is their intransigence and illogical beliefs.

We do it with Islamic extremism; I agree it’s not something that often works but it’s a better strategy than further alienating them (as we found out with islamic extremism)

I fear their lack of any sort of intelligence, the stench of piss from their bed sheets and the fact that their carers won’t let them out would be a barrier to meaningful dialogue.

See that’s exactly the kind of thing guaranteed to get them building bombs and is no better than say the Daily Mail making equally crass remarks about Ismalic extremists dark skin and beards.

Shame you missed out the key fact in your quote about (emergency) dependency leave. Your employer’s under no obligation to pay you unless it’s outlined in your contract.

Yes very good point and I did think about that and then totally forgot to point it out.

Biggest threat in the UK just now is far right groups.

Not sure how that can be known objectively or for certain but there is definitely truth in it. Perhaps it would be wise to try and understand their grievances and maybe see if there’s something we can do to integrate them more effectively into mainstream society.

It is indeed a nice analog set up. I’m in Horsham and have a similar level system built around a digital front end, And would be happy to entertain you here if you wanted to hear what a roughly equivalent digital source could sound like. Set up is as follows:

Server – LDMS Mini+
DAC – lampizator golden gate with psvane 300b tubes
Preamp – Concert Fidelity CF080SLX3
Poweramps – silvercore 833c mk2 monoblocs (SET design, 30 watts per channel)
Speakers Horns FP10s

Sorry totally crass response. Apologies.

Is the same as it is for any dependency related leave you take. COVID is irrelevant; you are entitled to take up to 25 days, I think, per year, of dependency leave. This can be for a child or an elderly relative and be For any reason if you are the primary caregiver.

I went to Ill de Rey in 2016 with the kids and it is a sublime place. Beaches are amazing and there are cycle tracks around the whole island. It’s quite a magical place to spend a holiday but accommodation can be expensive. There are lots of camping options though.

I have it very badly now in my right hand and had it also very badly in my left. I had a procedure to remove Dupuytrens Contracture in my left hand (done privately) and whilst they were in there, they also fixed my CTS, which is a simple procedure involving removing the sheath that envelopes the nerve and relieves the pressure which causes the pain.

Riding will probably just make it worse (it certainly won’t help), but you may find that the problem never gets to the point where you need to have the procedure done to fix it. You can get manipulation on it to try and give you some respite, for example, I had an osteopath treat me a few times but in all honesty it didn’t do much. The procedure however is very effective.

You will notice it most in the night; lying down seems to aggravate the problem and I will routinely wake up with radiating pain up and down my arm and acute pins and needles in my hand. It’s not much fun but it’s something I can live with until I can be bothered trying to get the right hand fixed.

Having just concluded my own divorce, I can tell you exactly what my solicitor told me and that is that in your case, with a marriage that long, everything will be considered marital and will be split equally between the two of you.

That incldes pensions. You will need to get a pensions consultancy to review your pension provisions and then give a discrete valuation of the total pot’s worth. That amount will then be on your balance sheets.

You basically add it all up and simply divide in two. The only times this doesn’t happen is when there are other needs for each party to be met, but since your kids have left home and are not dependent on you (and assuming your partner has no special needs to take account of), it will be 50/50.

You can split the assets any way you like, so one can keep their pension and the other the house equity if you wish, just so long as all the parts add up to half. In the case of pensions, there would need to be a an actual transfer of funds from your partner to you if you decide to do it this way.

I’m not sure if it’s Social mobility rather than just plain old wealth inequality you’re talking about OP

Well it’s both and while they are separate problems they are correlated.

but up to a point wealth and background play a limited part

Until recently I would have said the same as you but I’ve been told differently by someone who is an expert in this area; obviously nothing is absolute but the data she cites (from the cohort studies) is starting to show that social mobility has ground to a halt.

But wealth inequality, a disproportionate amount of wealth accumulated and held by a relatively small number of people, that’s a growing issue.

Indeed, and wealth inequality tends to correlate very positively with levels of violent crime and civil unrest. And given that those examples are the extreme ends of expressed negative emotion (and therefore relatively low incidence when compared to the population as a whole), it’s reasonable to suggest that there’s a very long tail behind those data of people feeling disenfranchised, depressed, angry, combative and hostile etc etc. My point is that while violent crime may be relartively high compared to long run trends, the frequency of it happening is still relatively low, but this belies a far greater under current of general ill/negative feeling in the population as a whole. And that comes at a price; it makes people dysfunctional and limits their ability to maximise things like life achievements or economic output.

I hear that the hot choice currently is anything by Land Rover!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-60229619

Fedualism

LOL touché mon cheri 😆

@judetheobscure another thing to consider is that for every successful businessperson who’s worked dead hard to build a business, there are millions who are working dead hard just to put food on the table for their families.

I agree 👍 this is why Rawls’ veil of ignorance is so important.

Not really, hence the question. I don’t agree. self made success is a different thing to being handed a leg up that you’ve done nothing to contribute towards.

The point I was making in a previous post is that self made people have often been given a leg up in some way even if that is by accident of birth.

My bestie is a great example of this. She has worked harder than anyone I know; tirelessly and unstintingly, sometimes 70+ hours a week and has had to survive through many failed attempts to start her own venture.

She hit the big time a few years ago, wealthy enough to solve the problem of whether to buy a Porsche or a Ferrari by buying one of each.

Her efforts easily justify the rewards she is enjoying, BUT we cannot overlook one salient fact that is critical to her success, and without this being true, it simply would not have been possible to do what she has done, and that is a brain busting IQ. She is a country mile smarter than everyone else I know.

Not every job requires an IQ in the 99th percentile (although it accounts for about 25% of your life outcome) but even where those that are self made have done so with only average levels of intelligence, there will usually be some other trait or characteristic that is to some degree inherited that will have helped.

Now I realise that this is trending towards a ‘social darwinist’ perspective, but if it is that, remember that the consequence of this (flawed) philosophy so popular with the Victorians, was philanthropy.

We tend to over estimate our success as being due to personal brilliance rather than circumstance or luck but even if that turns out to be true, society has contributed by making it possible for you to be that successful. We have a free market economy, open society (just) and everyone else making it possible for you to entrepreneur your way to a vast fortune.

You did not get there all by yourself (heck even my bestie had a stay home mum who raised their two kids, at least until the marriage fell apart!) and so you owe society your (generous) tax bill.

Something else I forgot to mention – the demographer friend told me that the problem with the housing market is less about inadequate supply and far more about under occupancy; lots of very large houses (usually occupied by baby boomers) with only two, or maybe even one person living in them. If we all traded places to optimise the size of house we need, we would largely solve the housing crisis.

Keep in mind that calibration (using Datacolour Spyder – I also use this) needs to be done in the place where you’re working as the light temperature will differ depending on the ambient light in that location (and indeed that will change significantly over time, especially if you end up turning on a light at some point in your day).

Unless you are doing lots of client or critical photo/video work you don’t really needs an external calibration tool (although they are nice to have), and your laptop should do it automatically; my Macbook Pro does it on the fly and I can sometimes see it changing if I move it slightly whilst it’s sitting on my lap! Have a look in the display settings for something relating to colour ‘temperature’.

The blue colour means your screen temperature has shifted colour temperature (the colour spectrum is counter intuitive – red is cool and blue is hot – think of it like stars where blue stars are hotter than red ones, but the settings on your monitor are reversed as they are designed to compensate for the external colour temperature, i.e. a lower value temperature will look hotter/bluer to compensate for a cooler/redder ambient light temperature).

Natural day light temperature is about 5000-5500k; if you’re sitting in natural light then set your screen temp to about that and it should look right. ALternatively just move the slider to the value that you feel is right for you.

??

I meant financial success but kind of thought that was obvious.

That is what income tax does to a certain extend (although only financial success).

Indeed it is And that’s why we should always design tax systems with a veil of ignorance.

es, and the more money you have to begin with the more you can make.

This is sadly true and the rule doesn’t just apply to money, it applies to all sorts of variables like IQ, creativity and other latent competency based skills that when applied with dilligence and industriousness, result in financial rewards.

Many of these variables aren’t quite as earned as we would like to thing; much of the data is showing us that there is an inherited element to these variables that might account for as much as half the outcome.

It’s why we need to tax success.

There was a really good article by John Harris on inequality in the UK in the Guardian the other day, which used the same word in the title as this thread

Luxury at the top, privation at the bottom: Britain is becoming feudal in its disparities

I feel vindicated for my use of metaphor!

there’s a few problems with your figures here

All duly noted and accepted and I welcome your corrections. Thank you.

but outside the south east and a couple of other hotspots their still surprisingly affordable

and other comments to this effect:

Yes, good point and also noted and accepted. I guess there is one caveat though which is that whilst house prices will be much lower in many parts of the UK, so will wages/salaries. I don’t know by how much though.

comparisons with a feudal system are really not helpful

Not sure why but I think we can both agree that the problem exists broadly as I’ve laid it out?

I really don’t see this as a party political issue though, at least not outside of a Corbyn led Labour Party (if he had won the election I genuinely feel he would have done something to directly address the issue).

Labour did exceptionally well with house prices also going up and I think it’s in their own interests as well for that to continue. They cannot win an election without a large swathe of the very people you highlight in your post TJ (relatively wealthy home owners) voting for them, which is how Labour won in ’97 and subsequent election years.

No they are not, people would not be buying them if they were!

I’m sorry I didn’t explain myself well initially.

House prices have to be affordable in order to explain the continued rise in them. That is obvious. My point isn’t that house prices are not affordable period, it is that they are increasingly only affordable for an increasingly small percentage of the population.

This is why I descibed it as being like a ‘feudal system’; as the stock is concentrated into a smaller number of hands, the rest of the population becomes bound to those landlords paying rent which never gets cheaper (unlike mortgages over time) and which never allows them to accumulate wealth. It’s a form of servitude (a bit like zero hours contracts).

I regard myself as a capitalist albeit one which, like George Soros states in Open Society, strongly believes in better regulation to ensure markets act both ethically and effeciently, so this isn’t me arguing from a Marxist perspective, far from it. It’s entirely apolitical not least because neither political party seems interested in addressing it.

Oh trés bien mon ami!

Politicians love to go on about social mobility but refuse to address the real issue which is inequality.

They’re the same thing, the only thing we haven’t really called out is what really causes it. This is where my demographer friend proved useful as she pointed out that the real cause of inequality is poverty; if you’re born poor, you remain poor.

When you look at the cohort studies, which she has in some detail for her PhD, you find that when you account for all other variables, the only variable which correlates with life outcome is your relative starting point for wealth. Social mobility does get talked about but it’s not addressed in the correct terms (at least as far as the data is telling us).

My friend (she really does exist btw but clearly I am not going to say anything more about her than this!) commented that in policy meetings with cabinet ministers, no one ever wants to address the real underlying causes, or correct other misaprehensions as to what ‘inequality’ is about, because to do so is political suicide on multiple levels.

For as long as the narative stays like it is, we will continue to slide into increasing levels of haves and have nots. I’m can’t be the only one who thinks that’s not a great outcome?

Average price of UK housing stock is now £270,000 meaning you’ll need around £20k for a deposit, conveyancing and moving costs.
Median UK household invome is just shy of £30k pa
That makes the average house price nine times your median income.
Intereest rates are low currently but inflation is running at 5.1%; 6% interest rates are something like a long run average over the last 30 years so a return to that level isn’t so far fetched, especially given what inflation is doing.
Let’s say you are able borrow £256k at 4% average over 25 years; that makes your monthly repayments £1355 per month. On a median income of £30k, with £300 a month set aside for pension, that makes your take home salary £1765 a month meaning your mortgage is 77% of your take home.

Clearly something is propping up the price of houses and clearly there are still a lot of first time buyers able to get on the housing ladder. My point (other than not being able to correctly type ‘feudal’) is this:

For the love of god why is this clearly unsustainable position not the thing we are protesting about? It is so obvious that this is the single biggest problem we face if what we want is a more equal society and yet no one makes that connection – this is where it looks a lot like a feudal system and I only use that reference to throw the issue into sharp relief.

His interviews with Brian Cox are really good.

But to others its a personal attack that is upsetting.

Just to Qualify but I didn’t take it as a personal attack and I wasn’t upset by it. I’ve read enough of your posts TJ (before joining) to know that this is your style and that you argue from an impassioned perspective of genuine and sincerely held beliefs. I respect that. However it’s a very combative and aggressive style of debate and if it is guilty of anything then it is guilty of not allowing for the possibility of nuance or more importantly the notion that nothing that is truly scientific is absolute; everything must remain falsifiable if it is to be considered scientific (Popper, K. 1999 All Life if Problem Solving, Routledge).
This approach does tend to result in debates on challenging subjects like vaccines and epidemics descending into echo chambers as other people have pointed out here. Part of the problem with that is the idea that anything that we discuss about those topics is an absolute; it’s not. Data may be relatively black-and-white what we then choose to do with data and how we interpret it is couched entirely in values and societal constructs. To illustrate the point, one person may feel comfortable only if there are zero deaths from Covid where is another person may feel comfortable if there is a rolling background level of mortality from Covid from here into eternity. That with their two positions can be scientifically correct even if the data is absolute. But this is getting off topic and I only reference it to illustrate how a position of absolute certainty about a thing is very often flawed.

This is another of my friend Ivan, whom I’ve been photographing for about two years. We started the project together at the commencement of lock down and in response to that. He is vulnerable (so no laws were broken) and we partly conceived the project to enable him to have a human connection with someone (as otherwise he would have been completely isolated and that would most likely not have turned out well for him!)

I hope you started it “Hey”

I won’t disclose the dialogue but I will say that my intuition (which about people is usually right) tells me that TJ and I are peas in a bloody pod 😆. It’s hard to be genuinely upset by anyone you recognise as ‘you’ on the other side of keyboard and screen.

I used a Dakine bag for years when heading to the Alps with my DH bike; it was the only bike bag big enough to comfortably fit a DH bike in but I’m sure there are others now. The Dakine has/had (not sure they still make them) a rigid frame so the bike was properly protected.

There’s actually one here on eBay in North Yorkshire for £35! Has to be cheaper than even renting one and they make useful storage when you’re not using them.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/234207559913?var=0&mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=710-53481-19255-0&toolid=10050&campid=5338358731&customid=16435831074775790888412041000008005

Tubeless tyres tend to have thicker sidewalls which means more friction losses, pair a tubed tyre with a latex innertube and I doubt the rolling resistance is measurably higher than a tubeless tyre.

Well that’ll be something that’s easy to establish; someone somewhere will have the data on it! I have always assumed that tubeless would always roll quicker than anything with a tube in, perhaps even than tubulars, but I don’t know that for a fact.

I do know from experience that latext inner tubes in clinchers are a bloody nightmare for punctures and very easy to damage when installing them. But this is also odd as most high quality tubulars use latext tubes, which is why they roll faster than traditional butyl/clincher set ups. It must be the construction of the tubular tyre that reduces punctures.