Talent

When you meet someone for the first time, and they find out you play music, they’ll often tell you about some musician friend of theirs – “oh they’re really good, very talented”.

Talented?

That’s ok when you’re talking about a kid, but I always think it’s almost insulting to a really good musician to refer to them as talented, because it ignores the enormous amount of hard work they’ve put in to get so good.

Really. Talent is the thing that allows someone to knock a tune out of an instrument they’ve never played before, it’s of very little help when playing Liszt. So don’t do that, ok?

Here’s an article from the Freakonomics column in the New York Times that backs me up.

Global warming and talking about the economy

I presume you’re familiar with the global warming “debate” – about a zillion scientists amass a mountain of evidence for anthropogenic global warming, then everyone else decides whether or not they agree with the scientists’ conclusions based on a few articles they’ve read in a newspaper or some blog or something they make up inside their own heads, and proceeds to have bad-tempered and long-winded arguments about the subject with whoever will listen. The reports of the IPCC are out there for anyone to read and you can dig deeper into the research and actually find the data if you’re interested … but even so you get people claiming the “there’s no science at all behind the climate change lobby” (in a recent comment on the Daily Telegraph site).

In a way it’s understandable – almost no-one actually has the time to delve deeply enough into the subject to fully understand it, so we just form an opinion based whatever crap we read in the media that reinforces our prejudices. But there does exist a large group of people who have devoted their professional lives to the careful scientific study of the climate, and they know what they’re talking about, and when the governments of the world decide to do something about climate change they know who to turn to. Maybe they won’t listen to them properly, maybe the world is fucked one way or the other, but at the very least we know who to ask.

The economy, on the other hand, seems to be a very different story. We’ve the same shit on the media and the internet – every fucker who’s read the wikipedia entry on supply and demand seems to think that They Know Best. That’s all to be expected, fair enough. But where are the experts who actually know what’s going on, who saw what was coming, and who know how to fix things? It seems a worrying proportion of economists simply predict things at random in the hope that they’ll get one prediction right and make a name for themselves as “the guy who predicted X”. There’s all manner of “experts”, but (though it’s hard to be sure of this on account of all the noise in the debate) there doesn’t seem to be any agreement whatsoever between them. One fella is saying the country’s about to go bankrupt because of the “bond spread” and someone else has some other indicator that means everything is fine. Who’s right? Economists don’t agree, governments don’t agree, everyone’s making contradictory claims and there doesn’t seem to be any reassuring men and women in white coats who actually know their shit to be found. I don’t know what to think, except for maybe economics is just bunkum after all.

The trouble with dumb bastards is …

.. that they are too dumb to know there is such as thing as being smart.

(Kurt Vonnegut said that, and he was right)

Here’s some evidence:

http://www.politics.ie/environment/4…-nutshell.html

Class war on the Irish airwaves

The workers: “Send the fat cats to jail!”

The employers: “Abolish the minimum wage!”

The media: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

Public sector pay – it’s not fair!

If you live in Ireland you’ll be aware that all the talk on the radio these days is the public sector pay bill, and how it’s going to be funded now that the public finances have gone to shit. Was talking to a public servant I know lately, and said “So, you expecting a pay cut?”. Here’s the answer – “Why should we take a pay cut? We didn’t cause the recession!”. When I suggested that prices seem to be falling and therefore no pay cut is equivalent to a pay rise, the response was “prices are only falling because the retailers aren’t ripping us off quite so much any more”. And then I got the usual earful about this fella or that fella who made a fortune and never paid a penny in tax and sure didn’t we pay 65 pence in the pound tax and 18% interest on the mortgage back in the 80s.

Em … what? Holy crap. I don’t mean to suggest that this kind of thinking is particular to public servants – listen to any talk radio show and there’s private sector workers (and business owners, and IBEC, those egregious pricks) ranting rants of their own. Hear ye, fellow citizens – the government is not your parents. If your entire political and economic stance is based on storing up anecdotes and twisting logic to prove that everyone else is unfairly getting a bigger slice of cake than you, then you have some growing up to do. You are also, unfortunately, in the majority.

BANG! BANG! BANG! More nails in the coffin of my utopian anarchist dream.

p.s. It’s my birthday today. Hooray!

Everything you knew was wrong

The importation and sale of contraception was illegal in Ireland until 1979. Homosexuality was illegal until 1993. When I was a kid and my parents were doing B&B during the summertime, they were genuinely morally conflicted when an unmarried couple shared a room – they needed the money, but they felt pretty weird about the couple “committing a sin” in their house.

Now you can buy condoms in the corner shop, my parents don’t consider their own sons sleeping with their girlfriends in the house even worthy of comment, and when they still did B&B they were happy to accommodate same-sex couples.  My mother doesn’t even seem to go to Mass anymore! All the things the moral guardians of generation warned about came to pass, and society didn’t collapse – on the contrary, despite the current economic crisis, almost everyone is better off now than they were then. How strange to discover you were so wrong about so much.

(inspired by a fragment of Anne Enright’s “The Gathering” which I’m quite enjoying at the moment)

More on intelligence and censoring your own posts

Haha, actually, check this out:

http://www.personalityresearch.org/intelligence.html

It seems some people are interested in other people’s musings on what “intelligence” really is, to the extent that some people make careers out of coming up with such musings (and, sometimes but not always, testing to see if they correspond to reality).

Lucky pricks

Censoring your own posts

Maybe I should do that more. Who the fuck is interested in my vague musings on “intelligence and iq”, where I don’t actually reach any conclusion or stumble on any actual insights?

Intelligence and IQ

Been thinking more and more about artificial intelligence, and intelligence itself …

I’ve thought for a long time that your raw intelligence becomes less and less important as you age – however powerful your brain hardware is, as time goes by it’s the software you have installed that really counts … you know, if you’re a smart kid in primary school it’s obvious, cos you can read and write and do sums better than most, but then in real life it’s not really noticeable if someone is clever. People considered “brainy” in school don’t necessarily do better in their jobs, or aren’t necessarily wealthier, or more knowledgeable about anything in particular – they’re just not as noticeably smart as they were as children.

I guess because I work as a programmer I had conceptualised IQ as a measure of the hardware processing power of someone’s brain, and that’s where the “hardware becomes less important than software” idea comes from. But, really, can one brain contain more processing power than another? If it could, it’d have to be something to do with the physical structure of the brain, and that’d mean that ultimately it’d be possible to measure someone’s IQ by looking at their brain.

It seems almost equally likely, though, that “braininess” has no physical basis, and is just a set of learned behaviours (like, for example, a mixture of curiosity and self-esteem). If that was the case, it’d have implication for artificial intelligence too. And for organisations like Mensa.

I suppose it’d be possible to test both models of intelligence by doing some kind of statistical analysis untangling heredity and environment by looking at separated-at-birth twins (same DNA and womb environment, different post-womb environment) and egg-donor siblings (same DNA, different womb and post-womb environments). Hmm maybe someone has already done it, let me look it up …

Road records to close

Terrible terrible news for the Dublin indie scene – Road Records has been the most important shop in Dublin for a long time, and they’ve always been real nice to us. Here’s Dave’s post from thumped:

I am very sad to say that we will in fact be closing down the store in the next 2 – 3 weeks as things have just become too difficult for us to proceed, we basically have no money left and as it is just a small shop run by Julie and myself we can longer afford to fund it. Belive me if we were at least breaking even each week then we would continue on in hope but as we are continually losing money, and have been for at least six months, we cannot carry on as any losses incurred will have to be personally paid for by us. We have put enough of our own money into the store in the last year just to keep it afloat but I am sad to say we really don’t have anything left at this stage, if we continue to trade we will just continue to lose money that we honestly do not have any more and thus we will end up paying off bank loans for the rest of our lives. I know a lot of people think if you have your own store that you have money behind you but believe me that is just a myth.

Its been an absolutely amazing eleven years for us and neither of us regret one single second of it, when we close I will not be looking back on wasted time in any way.
We have made some amazing friends through the shop and have had the pleasure of dealing with some truly fantastic bands [and their members].
Without blowing my own trumpet I do think Dublin will be a worse place without us as I think from day one we were always the most approachable store for Irish bands and their independent releases, it was one of the main reasons for setting up the store [some of you may remember the fact that I spent most of my youth plugging away in bands with nowhere to sell our music] and we have always tried to be as supportive to local music as possible, mainly because people in this country make music as good as if not better than anywhere else but have never had a proper outlet to sell it. We have always had a policy to make sure to play Irish music in the store so people in here can hear it and understand the quality and diversity of music being made in Ireland. If we heard something that excited us then we would always go out of our way to promote it as much as possible both in the store and on the site.

The reasons for the downturn are many and varied and if there was just one then we could try overcome that in some way but its no longer possible to pinpoint just one.
I will try list some of the reasons I see for the death of the small shop and I really do hope I am not right in thinking that many more will go the same way, I have always been optimistic that this city can sustain a couple of smaller indie shops but I no longer believe that to be true, again, I really hope I am wrong with this opinion but the way people go about buying their music these days does not instill me with too much confidence.

1. Regardless of what I have thought over the years downloading has effected our business, probably more so the illegal side of things, filesharhing and the likes. I speak as a shop on this one but god knows how much small bands suffer because of this aswell.

2. Below cost sellers online, everybody wants a bargain and its hard to take the moral highground on this one, but everytime a purchase is made to the likes of Play etc is a nail in the coffin to the indie store, these online sellers don’t care one hoot about indie bands and music, they just need to sell in bulk and as quickly as possible. They will never put any money or effort back into indigenous music, try asking them to sell 50 copies of a beautiful hand made cdr release.

3. The city centre just does not have the same volume of people walking around it anymore, its a simple fact, less people means less sales. We have noticed a massive downturn in the amount of people visiting the store in the last year.

4. Kids don’t buy music anymore. That sounds like a fairly broad statement to make, I know there are still some out there but we don’t see any young people in the shop anymore so as we lose older customers we don’t gain any new ones.

5. Obviously this country is going through a recession at the moment so it would be stupid of me to claim that this wasn’t having an effect on our business but having said that things were already beginning to change long before that.

6. The deal with selling independent local releases always had to be a two way exchange for us, we never made much money from local releases [and that was never the idea] but we always sought the support of bands. By that I mean if we were selling your music then we would always appreciate the bands making a purchase in the store in return, sadly that did not always happen, and before you jump at me for making this statement I do accept that plenty of you out there were very supportive of us but take if from me we did have quite a lot of bands coming in to us with their own release to sell whilst also carrying a hmv bag with a purchase they had just made, simply because it was cheaper there.

7. The cost of running a store in this city has increased dramatically in the past 4 / 5 years, rents have gone up so much, insurance increased, bank costs and so many other things that over the years it has become increasingly more difficult just to meet our costs on a week to week basis.

8. Whilst this one may not seem so obvious the cost of an average cd or record in the store is now less than it was 5 / 6 years ago and that is a good thing to the consumer but it has also seriously dented our chances of making a living in any way, it just means we have to sell more to cover our costs but as I mentioned with less customers coming through the door that has not been possible.

As you may gather from this piece we are both very very sad about the prospects of closing down our shop, this is our only way of making a living and now we are both back to square one with pretty much no money [and a brand new baby to support], I don’t know what either of us are going to do from now on but I’m sure we will survive.

I say this from my heart that I really hope the last few remaining indie stores will survive in the city and I hope you can take time out to visit them and make a purchase, otherwise these stores will not make it through these times either, and don’t leave it for a couple of weeks, do it today as they really do need your support and its only when they are all gone that you will then miss them.

Again, thank you all for your kind words and to anybody out there that has supported us in any way thank you also, we have had so much pleasure over the last eleven years doing what we do.

Dave and Julie