seec

Well, in the logistics department there is definitely more freedom. But it's not as much as you would think. You can ship stuff easily, travel easily, and send money easily, but at the end of the day, you'll have to submit to the government bureaucracy of each specific country with no real unifying logic and not even a shared language. Technically, English is used everywhere (even though, ironically, the English are not even part of the EU anymore), but you can't really rely on it to get anything done locally in small cities. If you want to move in the middle of France, good luck trying to deal with the bureaucrats in English for example.

Then the freedom was a pretext to do a lot of social dumping. If you ask the workers of the Renault plant that got displaced in the east because of lower labor costs, they won't have a lot of good things to say about this freedom. I know a trucker who somewhat hates Poles, not because he has anything against them particularly but because they engage in social dumping by competing for work in France while only following laws from Poland. A Frenchman living in France can never be competitive with that because he has to pay a lot more in taxes and follows the French laws.

Germany engages in regulatory warfare for electricity. They are ideologically against nuclear and imposed renewables as the only solution (while burning a shit ton of coal/gas). Since their approach is very costly and not reliable, they imposed regulation on the European electricity to make the cheaper French nuclear electricity less competitive. That wasn't enough, so even though they don't have nuclear anymore, they forced themselves into the Flamanville project and imposed their insane regulation (via Siemens), which is the major reason it took so long. This is industrial sabotage and engaging in bad-faith collaboration. And now we have to sell them winter electricity on the cheap while they offload their summer electricity that literally nobody wants. It's impossible to not hate them for it, since electricity prices have risen tremendously for the end consumer. The crazy part is that it completely undermined the supposed goal of lowering emission (people went back to heating with wood-burning and paraffin/kerosene stoves).

Spain floods the market with cheap fruits/vegetables that are much cheaper not only because of geographical comparative advantages but also because they import cheap seasonal labor from North Africa, often not respecting labor rules (that much became obvious in the COVID crisis).

Italy wants to leave because they are going down the fascist path they already took a while ago.

Lidl, a German supermarket chain, sells cheap Chinese-made tools in their stores under the pretense of German quality. But since the rise of platforms like AliExpress/Temu, consumers have had access to similar items for even cheaper because they allow cutting out the middleman. Unsurprisingly, the EU ruled that now consumers have to pay taxes on the items they buy directly from China. Freedom is OK only when it is the powerful that can fill their pocket after engaging in rampant social dumping. For now, China has settled on shipping stuff to a warehouse located in Eastern Europe and dispatching it from here, basically using a regulatory loophole that allows them to pay the cheapest amount of taxes.

I could go on and on, but the reality is that the EU has largely impoverished and weakened most of its constituent countries. It doesn't look that way for now, because everything has been paid for with unsustainable debt. But now the invoice is being presented to the young generations. The EU can't even manage to make a common army or apply regulation uniformly across countries (look at the labels on products).

All it has done is create unfair competition that benefits the powerful first and foremost. So yeah, you can travel freely, but who cares? In my youth I traveled in many EU countries before it was open like that. Stopping at customs and having to exchange currency was inconvenient, but improving those mild problems is definitely not worth the massive amount of exploitation and dissent that has resulted.

The EU is the same ideological enterprise as the USSR, and the same problems that are linked to a massive bureaucracy are now showing up. You just cannot force different groups to adopt the same rules/behaviors because there are too many cultural differences. Values are too far apart, and the environment/advantages are too different. Germany likes the EU a lot because they have outsized political power in it and are the ones who profit the most: they get access to cheap eastern labor/resources while being able to sell in the rich markets of their neighbors on the other side.

We may enjoy the freedom while it lasts, because the EU is under attack from all fronts. Russia is waging a real war, China is engaging in economic warfare and the US is pulling out military support to gain resources. The constituent countries are not any stronger, and in fact, they have weakened their position on many fronts. Fighting together is illusory because the interests/incentives are more often opposed than aligned.

Stereotypes exist for a reason. It would be stupid to argue that every single Russian is exactly like that. But at the same time you'll find those traits exhibited in a lot of Russians at various levels of seriousness.

Being bigoted is also pretending that tribes/cultures do not share patterns and behavior. Individuals are unique, but they exist as part of a group. When you talk about the group, you necessarily need to make shortcuts and synthesize.

I'm pretty sure that when you talk about dogs, you'll attribute specific behaviors to specific races. But now it is not politically correct to think humans are the same, even though it is scientifically provable.

They won't be able to solve the problem. The only reason all those roadblocks exist is to control/regulate everything in a way to ensure the maximum possible taxation. At the same time, bureaucrats get to justify their existence, pretending to do meaningful work while they only take from productive people.

You can't even say they manage to regulate actual problems; they only reinforce the big players. The cookie consent banner nonsense and ongoing legal fight with Apple (and GAFAM in general) didn't bring anything of value to end consumers.

Cookies haven't disappeared; they have just become a major annoyance that you have to spend a lot of time clicking on and tracking hasn't been reduced, quite the contrary. The iPhone is still a locked-down device, with Apple maintaining a monopoly on software access as well as repairability (their repair program is such a joke that they should be tried for contempt if the EU actually had any power).

Bureaucracy is just cancer, and the EU is fully metastasized; there is not much that can improve until a major failure happens.

If you want to create a business, you have to pay the bureaucracy before you even make a single cent. Business has become more profitable to the government than the actual business owners; those thriving are the big ones who can afford to play the lobbying game and engage in regulatory capture and offload most of the cost on the taxpayers while profiting overseas.

Well, that's a very hard question to answer without additional details.

If it's graphics/presentation heavy, you most likely will need something like InDesign. If there is a lot of math, you'll need something like Latex (typist). If there are a lot of tables, you probably need something like Word to auto-update embeds from Excel. In general, Word will allow you to control features like footnotes/endnotes, tables of figures, etc, much better than Pages ever will.

If it's mostly literature, you can use something like Vellum (https://vellum.pub/)

I don't have a list of solutions ready, but maybe I should make one. This is a complex problem, and the safe answer is usually to just use Word.

The problem with Pages is that it is extremely mediocre at everything while still locking you down to Apple hardware.

The young, foolish version of myself was a rabid Apple fanboy and pushed people to use Pages (back in the day when the iWork suite was paid but cheaper). Then people came back to me with problems that could be solved in Word relatively easily, but I had no answer for with Pages.

After being tired of saying, "no you can't do that" or "that has to be done manually," I stopped advocating for Pages.

I don't do much document preparation nowadays, but I think the ideal solution would be a GUI to bridge between web publishing and paper publishing.

You can load unpublished extensions with developer mode. It's not as convenient but works just fine. Try that with Safari.

API level maybe, but what I care about is being able to install an extension with one click and no hassle. Apple makes this too hard to extort money via the App Store, so they can shove it where the sun doesn't shine.

Yep, it's just the reality distortion field. Apple fanboys can never admit they don't have the best stuff.

In similar veins, they'll say that Windows uses more RAM than macOS. Yet on both an iMac that was bootcamped and a custom-built hackintosh, macOS almost always used more RAM after booting.

Apple makes great hardware but the software is often very mid, its only visually pleasing.

You just dismiss all my critics as irrelevant and not something I should care about. Translation came later and isn't as convenient as on Chrome. I don't know why you think "never use any other hardware than Apple's" is a viable argument. I need to have both a PC and a Mac; having a browser that syncs without the hassle that is iCloud on Windows is important.

If they can't make what people want, they go somewhere else, exactly what I did.

Translation came out much later and isn't as convenient (no auto-loading).

Form filling and login just work better on Chrome; that's not subjective at all.

Tabs syncing works better and faster with Chrome, one of the reasons I switched is that Safari implementation was laggy and buggy (happened with the password sync problem as well).

Bookmarks favicons came back, but they were removed for many versions, which was very annoying.

I don't use Google apps much, and I don't find the Apple ecosystem integration to be that useful. At best they are a convenience, but often just gimmicks.

I still mostly use Apple devices but have a PC as well. Apple iCloud for Windows is buggy and annoying as hell and requires using Chrome anyway; might as well skip the step of using Safari.

Google definitely has some walling as well, but it works with more hardware and is generally easier to integrate. Apple really plays nice with their own stuff.

I was once a defender of Apple's approach, especially for native apps and stuff like that. They have shown they can't be trusted. We are very far from the era when Apple was making Safari for Windows because they wanted to offer a better browser to everyone. Now only the bottom line matters, even though they have never been as rich as now.

The reason they fight so hard to prevent 3rd-party browser engines on iOS is because they know they would lose market share extremely fast.

Make no mistake, I would prefer to use Apple stuff but it just isn't very competitive anymore, and they really need to put a lot of effort into it.

Apple took a shortcut for DPI scaling implementation because they only care about selling their own hardware. If you use anything else, it's a pain in the ass. This is a big problem of today's Apple, because they can't manage to release competitively priced hardware in some categories.

I share your sentiment very strongly.

Apple's change for the sake of change is extremely annoying, especially since the changes have been regressions lately. They always push their commercial interest at the cost of their users, refusing to maintain stuff properly to save money.

At some point I had to change a Mac because the GPU wasn't compatible with some apps after they pushed their Metal framework. But it was working just fine for me, and I didn't really need to change it at this moment; Apple just decided so.

And if you use their software on different hardware and make the mistake of upgrading just one, it is very likely that you will have to upgrade the other because the newer software version won't be compatible with the older hardware (had the problem with Notes/Reminders database needing an OS upgrade to be able to sync).

Microsoft is all over the place, but at least it is very likely that you can get away with changing your hardware only once every 10 years if you buy high-end stuff.

And the problem with those comparisons is that they make it look like everything is swappable without any issue.

Places where we raise cows generally do not support other types of agriculture (especially milk cows in the mountains).

You may stop raising cows, but it doesn't mean you will be able to grow nuts or pulses in the same place. That causes big problems for food security and economic networks.

All the arguments around emissions or caloric efficiency are way too simplistic to accurately describe the problem.

The reason to use Chrome is better extension support, better/more useful functionalities (translation, favicon bookmarks, Google Lens), better autofill/autologin, and better performance for web apps generally. Another very useful property is being able to sync your Chrome profile on any computer, which comes in very handy when you need to do stuff on computers you do not own. Doing the same with Safari is possible but a hassle.

I have used Safari since it replace Internet Explorer back in the days, then switched to Chrome a few years ago after a beta broke password syncing and AdBlocker Extensions for Safari were paid/not as good.

Like much of Apple's software, it has strengths and looks good but is really lacking in many ways. It also locks you into the walled garden pretty tight, which can be annoying at times.

Apple should go back to releasing a cross-platform version if they want to be taken seriously, in my opinion. In general, their incentive to build software solely for their platform is a double-edged sword because they can't manage to create hardware that can cover every need (especially for 3D/engineering), and it becomes very annoying to rely on it the moment you need to use another OS (either Windows or Linux).

Another example is Apple Notes being decent, but using it in the web browser is basically a joke (might as well not exist).

They are not as volumetrically efficient, but it's probably not too far from the approximation plus 10-15% I think. Potatoes are mostly water.

Potatoes have low caloric density (80 kcal/100 g), so the ideal would be to dry them and store them in a sustainable form like ready-to-use mash.

At 2000 kcal/day average caloric expenditure, you could feed 1.6 million people for a day. Or 3.2 if it was only half the diet. That's a lot of food indeed!

The problem is most of the volume/weight is water; that's not very convenient. In comparison, an equivalent volume of cereals would feed 7 million people and are much easier to store long term, they are very efficient !

Yeh, Linux desktops are pretty good nowadays; the problem is just software support. If commercial software were easier to make/sell for Linux, that would be great.

There are not a lot of technologists left, and they are dominated by the crowd anyway. Apple used to cater more to people who really liked computers, but now they try to sell to everyone, so the objectives have changed a lot, sadly.

Alt Tab is alright, but it's not as smooth as native Windows window management. It always has a lot of overlays/orphaned/invisible windows hanging out in there.

Something like that really needs to be implemented at the OS level to be trully competent.

TaskBar is cool but I'm not a fan of needing to have something like a dock constantly taking vertical space while we have the menu bar on top. After years of using both, I think Microsoft decision to bundle both into a single taskbar is just much better. And the menu bar is annoying when you use multiple monitors.

I personally use Moom for windows layout, which gives you something close to PowerToys and is pretty decent. Still, it is an added utility app that you have to pay for; Apple should ship it with the OS at this point.

iPadOS is almost irrelevant for productivity anyway; there are too many flaws and limitations, and all the software are expensive subscriptions. My point is that they had a blank slate to come up with something better but still decided to just copy what they already had, which completely defeats the purpose of having a newer platform/OS.

In the end, many of Apple's UI decisions looked good when computers were simpler, but nowadays they show their limitations heavily. Windows has many architectural flaws and not as good software for some niches, but the workflow feels better.

Agreed.

I feel like if you were to be content with those tools, you wouldn't really want to pay for them. I guess the argument is getting access to Final Cut and Logic for cheap, but there are pro software of the same quality accessible for free or close to it (usually people get starter DAW licenses from buying hardware, and DaVinci has free stuff).

Apple is losing the plot on so many levels. If they want to make their stuff subscription, they really need to make it much better than it is at the moment.

Yeah, in my experience, Pixelmator looks the part but isn't a very good software, especially for vectors. Affinity stuff doesn't look as good but gets much closer to Adobe quality tools.

It's OK but way too limited for proper layouts and doesn't have enough features for long/complex documents like books.

As it is, it's barely better than GDocs but less convenient, and since people rarely need to print stuff, layout isn't that important.

That has always been an issue. Pros buy Apple hardware but very rarely commit to Apple software. In my experience, they are perfectly right. Not only can Apple not be trusted to maintain the software to be competitive feature-wise, but they are also very likely to get bored or make some annoying hardware requirement that makes fleet management annoying.

In the end, their creative software is just ok; it's probably best to not rely on it too much if you don't want to get stuck. After they canceled Aperture for no good reason and destroyed the iWork suite while taking forever to even manage feature parity, I'll never rely on or recommend Apple software.

Agreed. The problem is that native window management is pretty bad in macOS. And the 3rd party tools solving the problem aren't that great on top of being expensive sometimes.

Apple could fix it, but instead they made overlapping windows for iPadOS, which is even dumber considering the smaller display area.

I think it doesn't matter what they do; part of their clientele is fully captive, another part is only there for the status, and the last part is just using it rudimentally, so anything is OK.

That's basically the problem of today's Apple, and it won't get fixed because they have an incentive to let the 3rd parties fix those problems (they win both by taking a cut of software sales in the app store and selling more Macs while costing less dev money).

I doubt anything is going to get fixed, and Apple's hardware crown isn't as strong as before. But they like selling "services," so...

Macs have largely been the same. It is just a matter of buzy compute and letting all the accumulated tasks complete.

When you buy powerfull computers, this problem basically doesn't exist, both on Windows or macOS. Since Macs have historically been more expensive and premium, even the cheaper model was powerfull enough to finish the boot sequence fast enough that the desktop would feel snappy almost instantly. On the other hand, cheap PCs struggle to accomplish every task in a timely manner.

I am amazed about how stupid and ignorant is the average Mac fanboy. I have been a Mac user first and foremost, but you guys are just full of shit.

The reason is money and control. That's it. Believing otherwise is foolish. They don't really give a shit about privacy or whatever is the supposed agenda of the day. It's about not paying as much to the US and being able to control the infrastruscture.

I trust EU govs less than I trust US companies. At least I know that for the companies it's just about making more money and there isn't that many downsides for me outside of having to pay one way or another. EU govs are fundamentally destructive, so whatever they end up doing you can be sure it will terrible for everyone but themselves.

Your parents determine a lot of your trajectory. If they don't make the same investement in their kids as the average for the socioeconomic, you start with a heavy penalty. You can work hard, but you'll have to work twice as hard as everyone else.

If you friends gets permit, cars, fully financed studies but you get thrown out to work straight out of high school what is the probability you would give to be able to accomplish the same things as your friends in a similar timeline. Sure you can work hard and you will get somewhere, but is that somewhere anywhere near what could be possible ? I would argue not.

The left often argues about unfair advantage from famillies having money. In my experience it's not the having money part that is important, its the parent willing to invest it in their children. I know some people who accomplished a lot with poor parents, but they got full support from both gov aids and parents, it generally explains a lot.

Without talking about the genetic lottery, life is unfair and hard work isn't really all that's needed. It can never hurt but at the same time you can work much harder than most and never get as much. Add politics in the mix and anything goes.

I'm mostly talking about people that don't really have a manager above them or all the freedom they need to organise payroll as they see fit. Restaurants owners, recreation center owner, tradesman, etc.

They really could reward good elements, but treat everyone as interchangeable at the same exact pay rate. They get mad when people don't do as good as a job as they wish and then they get mad when they find another job.

I have many examples, but 2 recent ones where:

- a man who was hired as lifeguard for a small pool was being complained about for not cleaning the thing properly, even though every single similar job do not require this tasks for the same pay level, he left to create his own business with friends and is much happier (even though he doesn't make much more money yet).

- a woman who was hired as waitress ended up doing the vast majority of the work for the other waitress, a woman part owne that was quite a bitch in many ways. The hired woman got paid minimum wage and had to share the tips, even though from what I saw, she is the one who got most of them. The next season, she refused to come back, prefering instead working as a cashier. The woman owner was somehow confused. The hired woman was a strong worker, no reason to slave away for greedy ungratefull owners.

Unsurprisingly, the first business isn't going well (2 year going chronic deficit) and the second one just failed after 4 years. Those people just don't understand the true value of work, because they never had to do as much work themselves. I won't details my connection but they are people I know very well and the link is so obvious to me, but apparently not to them. But they are failing, so I guess karma is a bitch in the end.

Ah yes for those use cases it makes perfect sense.

Apple excuse for stopping the big iMacs was that when you bundle up the display with the compute it makes it hard to upgrade and the whole thing become useless. But in reality it just looks like some bad "reasoning" to force people to spend more on a less elegant solution that probably won't get upgraded that much.

At least an old school 5K iMac can have some secondary use case, like you demonstrated or even just to watch movies, do some light document editing and such. And you can convert them to displays if you really want, but that should have been a built-in functionnality in the first place.

I guess this is why they still commend a relatively high-price, a good large display still has many uses even if the compute is weak.

The studio display is kinda useless outside of Mac use, so even though it's great quality its really not a good deal.

I really hope Apple finally release another big iMac because I won't get another Mac Mini or a Mac Studio. I like macOS (less so nowadays) but the whole point of the Mac was the integrated hardware for base/mid-range power. Their small desktop boxes that cannot take any upgrades are really pointless as a desktop because you end up with cable galore and not much space saved. This is so stupidly inelegant, I can feel Jobs rolling in his grave. They added front accessible ports, so that's something I guess, but come on, they stink of greed and profit maximisation at all costs...

Yeah I think the 40s series is the sweet spot for nearfield, definitely.

I am not a subwoofer guy, in fact I am pretty much against subs. In my experience, the result never really match the theory. Bass frequency are not directional but if the speaker producing them isn't setup physically at the same location as the other speakers you get phase coherence and power mismatch problems. On top of that most peoples do not have access to speakers that can produce such low frequencies, so it is not really worthwhile to use them to produce. You end up with results that don't sound that well in most systems because they lack a part of the work. Sub frequencies are also felt physically and quite tiring for long term listening. It always feels nice at first, because it's suprising and powefull but really it is not where the focus in music production should be.

I have had access to some recording studios (even built a small one with friends in association) and my experience is they don't really use subs. If they need more power they just get bigger speakers that will reproduce the relevant frequencies coherently. There is basically no instrument that goes below 20Hz, even a pipe organ which is a massive object basically requiring a church, does not get there. The energy requirement to produce sub 20Hz sound just doens't make sense and it doesn't add much to the music, you just feel a rumble, most people cannot even hear that low. In fact even between 20 and 30Hz is not that important. It still requires a lot of power and either you get something that is dominated by the rest of you put the power and it covers everything else. I played french horn in various harmonies and the tubas were right behind me. It's one of the few instrument that can technically hit sub 30Hz while still being of manageable size. Whenever they had a low part, their sound was much more quiet, the wind volume requirement to sustain those notes is tremendous and I can tell you there was not many compositions that would go that low, because composers know that. Even if you want to focus solely on modern music, sub notes are just a gimmick, because like I said, they become tiring and overpowering really fast. I had a friend who was listening to dub constantly and over time it was boring, monotonous and tiring because of the omnipresent bass part. This genre is linked to the creation of massive sound system that tries to produce bass as low a possible for the physical factor but past the wow factor, it's not really pleasant and very likely to damage your ears if they play them over the 90db level.

So yeah Genelec sub are overpriced but this is not really a problem confined to Genelec. Every sub is overpriced for the benefits they have. It is mostly about dick measuring contest or being able to say we have the best and can produce frequencies most people don't care about.

Unless you trully have an end game monitor what you really want is just a better monitor that can produce the really usefull frequency range with more power without distorting while keeping everything in phase. The biggest main monitor from Genelec (1236A), technically goes as low as 17,5Hz and this is what you really want, but in practice it's no even really needed.

There is a recording studio in my town, that got built by some friends and they produce music for Netflix. It's not a small studio size wize, the main room is big enough to handle a mid-sized orchestra (it was a disaffected cinema, they built around this to be able to work with projected movies), it's 1200m2 main room with 50m2 control room. But they don't have subs. They have multiple mains, some are Neuman, some are older Genelec models and some are Adams for 5.1 handling (I think they technically have Atmos capacity since they have overhead speakers but they don't use it, it was too much trouble for little commercial benefits). You can check it out there: https://www.instagram.com/studiospalace/

If you think you need a sub but don't have the biggest speakers your room can handle, you are misallocating money. They are just the cherry on top when everything else is near perfect. Like the cherry, they can add a subtle touch but not really necessary for good music production or even good listening. The quantity of music that will make use of them meaningfully is so vanishingly small it's not very relevant. It's like looking at cars and choosing solely on the top end speed, you are unlikely to need it and even if you want to use the capacity, the risks are not worth the reward.

This is why GLM doesn't handle multi-sub well, it's just not a feature that would get used a lot by their high-end customers, they can already pay for the high end monitors. And generally GLM isn't really the best for room correction but it is just a convenient solution that will work well with no hassle if you only buy hardware from Genelec. I see Genelec as the Apple of monitors. If you have the money, it is hard to find a setup that will get results as good without spending a lot of time building a custom solution that can use speakers from mismatched brands. Just like you can buy hardware cheaper than Apple but it will require a lot of work to end up with a solution that is transparently integrated as well.

What is legendary about Genelec is not just their reliability (most monitors are perfectly reliable if you treat them well, unless you go for bottom of the barel made in China) but the quality of their frequency reproduction (especially if you consider size for the nearfields). There are a few competitors that make comparable speakers (like Neumann, ATC or JBL pro line) but they are not necesseraly cheaper and don't really have a integrated solution like GLM. In the nearfield range, Neumann does quite well but they are not as good as coax Genelecs, but they are cheaper.

I don't want to brag too much, but when I was in music theory while young, I always got very close to perfect score in music dictation. I have listenned to quite a lot of monitors from the most reputable brands (Genelec, Neumann, Dynaudio, Focal, JBL, Adams, KRK) or even less reputable brands (Presonus, Yamaha, Tannoy, Monkey Banana, Mackie, Behringer, Prodipe, etc) and my experience is that Genelec is up there in the quality of reproduction which is why they can commend such a high price.

I actually wish someone could come up with monitors that would match Genelecs but at a much lower price. So far, every niche maker that I have heard about only came close and weren't any cheaper (often more expensive actually). In that sense, it's a lot like Apple laptops, the brands who come close to the quality are not doing it for much cheaper if at all...

Yes, I completly agree with your point of view, which is exactly why I said that.

They are using capitalism as a boogeyman for everything, when in practice the system in place is so far removed from "real" capitalism that ones need to be either blind or ideologicaly corrupt to put the blame there.

Unregulated capitalism has many weakness, the most potent one being that there is pruning of useless actors and that results in poverty and some people being left behind. But the remedy that is applied today isn't really much better, people are still left behind, just more slowly and that comes with massive oppotunity cost for those at the bottom, since they are the ones most likely to really benefit from the freedom that comes with capitalism.

This is just what the ideologues working in academia and politics (deeply linked) always come up with, even though their existence and ability to make such critics is fully funded by capitalism. There are just keeping the tradition of Marx that was completly funded by capitalists but came up with the argument that it was the worst system possible.