Discussion and Debate fellowship thread.

Been watching Justified on Amazon. Almost done with season 5. Hoping they release 6 soon.

I'm Jerry. I recently retired after 40+ years as a health care provider. I'm very interested in health care delivery and insurance systems. Which is obviously a hot topic now. Biomedical ethics is also one of my favorite discussion topics. I was a member of a hospital ethics committee for 10 years. In fact, that's how I found this forum. One of the co-chairmen of our committee was the hospital chaplain and a Methodist minister. He was familiar with CF, and recommended the E & M subforum as a good on-line discussion site. So I've hung around for 10,000+ posts now.

Armoured said:

You've been in high school for 20 years?

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Yeah, I love it so much... I just didn't want to leave, lol.

12 years in school was enough for me. Especially the 6 years I spent in 4th grade.

rambot said:

Without my garden (and my health benefits offerred by my employer), my job would have made me a complete nutcase, unable to retain employment.

Thank you self help!

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There is a gardening forum! Come join us here Gardening shouldnt be stuck in the kitchen.

USincognito said:

Oh come now. We've been living in a golden age of scripted comedy and drama. Surely you can find something that appeals to you.

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It's more like the golden age of watching this show on this night at this time is gone.

Goodbook said:

There is a gardening forum! Come join us here Gardening shouldnt be stuck in the kitchen.

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MAny moons ago, I posted there!

Howdy,

I live in Baltimore and I do audio production for a living. These days, it's mostly voiceover recording and sound design/editing for video games, but in the past it's included music recording, concert production, and live theater. I'd rather not give my name, since there are few enough people in this town with that job that a motivated person could identify me.

I came here with the migration from Crosswalk.com when they shuttered their forums.

USincognito said:

I started using the Internet back when user ID's and handles were you "idenity", but have since embraced social media in fact USincognito wasn't even my normal user name in 2003, hence the "incognito" part.

This reminds me of a maddening pattern I noticed with some people in 2004-06 when I was attending JREF Amaz!ng Meetings. I'd start a thread on the forum for folks to post photos of themselves so they would be recognized on sight at the conference. Some would post crude drawings or heavily edited photos. Invariably folks would post after TAM that no one spoke to them and I was always, "if you'd posted an actual photo of yourself instead of s Ziggy cartoon people might have recognized and spoken to you".

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Lol, I had a similar experience recently at a convention. There were a bunch of people there who I talk to online regularly, but whom I know only from Facebook. I changed my facial hair a few years ago but never updated my profile picture, and wound up having several people say they didn't recognize me. One guy even expressed surprise after the conference that I'd been there, when I'd passed him several times and once stood a few feet from him, talking to his business partner while waiting for their joint panel to begin. :-b I probably would've been more outgoing, but I was really hungover.

USincognito said:

Do expensive gold cables truly improve speaker sound quality sufficiently to warrant the cost?

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No. In fact, they potentially make it worse. If the contacts on one side are gold and the contacts on the other side aren't, you can wind up with the galvanic effect causing increased corrosion at the point where the two metals meet.

There is some value in better-than-cheapest cabling, but the value curve tends to peak somewhere around the median of the price field - and even then, a lot of the value with the more expensive stuff comes in terms of durability and/or better rf rejection, not necessarily straight up sound quality. In virtually all cases, the really expensive stuff is nonsense. This is even more true for digital cabling (e.g. hdmi, aes, etc), where signal degradation is more of a binary state, i.e. it either gets through or it doesn't.

USincognito said:

Thanks for the professional input. This is an old question on the JREF Forum (now International Skeptics Forum) and a great example of practical skepticism.

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Sure thing. To be clear, there can be real benefits to laying down extra money on better cable, but the trick is in defining exactly how that cable is "better" and in whether or not those potential benefits are anything you actually care about.

For example, things like what the jacket is made out of, how thick the jacket is, and how the shielding is designed (e.g. braided or spiral unbraided) can have huge impacts on how you deploy a particular cable. If you want to run cable through an air duct or certain other sensitive areas, then you have to used something that's plenum-rated, which means that it's not going to put off noxious gases when it catches fire. If you're working on a concert tour, then you need cables that are durable but that are also very flexible and that lay flat when you coil them. But if you're wiring up a rack or the inside of a console, then durability and pliability aren't big concerns, since nothing will be moved - but cable diameter is a concern, since you need to pack a ton of cabling into a tight space. Small diameter on a concert stage can actually work against you, since the connectors require a jacket diameter of a certain size so that the strain relief has something to grab onto - if it's too small, any tension on the cable will be applied right to the solder joints, making them fail sooner. Braided shielding may offer better RF rejection, but it takes longer to assemble, and if you're paying your bench guys by the hour.... One of the more interesting ones (for me, anyways) is Star Quad cable, which uses a twisted pair for each conductor instead of a single wire. It offers better RF rejection, but at the cost of slightly higher cable capacitance, which causes a small but measurable high-frequency roll-off. It's also kind of a pain in the butt to assemble.

Typically, though, if I'm buying stuff instead of building it myself, I just look at the connectors. There are only a handful of companies that make reliable audio connectors in large numbers. If a cable is built with connectors from one of those manufacturers rather than some Chinese knockoff or (worse) molded plastic, then I can be reasonably confident that, unless I have some really specific and/or heavy-duty requirements, the whole thing is going to be acceptable for my day-to-day stuff.

For the average person at home, there are a ton of things you can do to make your gear and environment sound better (including some that are very effective and relatively inexpensive), and as long as your cables aren't broken, fancy cables are pretty far down the list.

Hello, friends. I came to this forum looking for a place to express my thoughts freely as well as have my thoughts challenged. As my signature indicates, I'm "in the closet" about my atheism so I kind of needed an outlet.

I enjoy drawing, playing the piano, Photoshoppin', reading, watching debates, and cuddles. My username and avatar are from my favorite show...

USincognito said:

Hi everyone, my name is Bret and I'm a discussion and debate junkie.

My family was career Air Force and I grew up in numerous states and countries. I love ethnic cuisine and The Walking Dead.

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I read and enjoyed some of your posts before I signed up on the forums yesterday. Nice to meet you.

USincognito said:

I guess we can add our "origins" story. In late 2003 I was looking for a new Creationism and evolution debate venue and saw CF listed on another forum by WinAce. Participated in the now closed General Apologetics subforum, but much of what I read there and the rise of the New Atheists turned me off the subject completely in all venues. Since the C&E subforum is a shadow of its former self, I mainly post to American Politics now.

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I miss Allan.

Strange. How can you miss someone that you never met?

USincognito said:

I guess we can add our "origins" story. In late 2003 I was looking for a new Creationism and evolution debate venue and saw CF listed on another forum by WinAce. Participated in the now closed General Apologetics subforum, but much of what I read there and the rise of the New Atheists turned me off the subject completely in all venues. Since the C&E subforum is a shadow of its former self, I mainly post to American Politics now.

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Ah yes the "new atheist", their condescending and patronizing tone turn me away atheism in my teen years.

rambot said:

Hi! I'm Remco.
Yup. No spelling misteakes; that's my name.
I'm just turned 40, married with two kids (7girl, 2 boy).
I am a youth counsellor at a treatment facility; used to be a family support worker; before that, a teacher.

We had a housefire last year and we're able to live in our place. We are now back in and, thank heavens, we will be able to have our garden back!

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Oh wow, I'll be 40 next month. Go class of 95!

Anyways, I work on high voltage powerlines, distro, transmission and everything in between. I spend what little free time I have with my wife and four daughters and I enjoy television, good food and bumming around at the beach. I live by Angel stadium in California, but I've only been to a few games in the last couple years.

Electricity is so weird. I like playing with small arcs at work. Here's a big one --