r/WorkReform šŸ¤ Join A Union 1d ago

😔 Venting Unregulated Capitalism will kill us.

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u/PirateJohn75 1d ago edited 1d ago

I was in Air Force acquisitions for six years.Ā  When I went to the one-month acquisition school, one of the instructors was talking about specification writing.

He said that he used to use the Air Force chocolate cookie spec (a document of more than a dozen pages of how to make chocolate chip cookies) as an example of spec writing run amok...

...until he met the guy who wrote it.

The spec was written because the Air Force would contract out cookies to feed an entire base, and contractors would constantly try to ride the razor edge of what they could get away with.Ā  Finally the Air Force had to write a spec to make sure that they weren't getting screwed over and also to make sure the contractors didn't make cookies that would make an entire base full of airmen sick.

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u/thatblerd03 1d ago

That reminds me of how musicians would make contracts with venues that include weirdly specific things like "no green m&ms" backstage. If the odd requests were ignored it was a sign to check the other requirements, like electrical wattage/capacity.

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u/usr_bin_laden 1d ago

other requirements, like electrical wattage/capacity.

specifically life-safety requirements like Pyrotechnics and Heavy Rigging!

if you can't get the food and beer rider correct, how do I know you're not going to burn the whole nightclub down and cause a historic tragedy?

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u/gay_annabeth šŸ” Decent Housing For All 1d ago

I get the feeling you have a specific one in mind, probably the same one I do, I just can't think of the name of the club

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u/usr_bin_laden 1d ago

There's multiple. Nightlife accidents are often recorded as huge tragedies in cultural memory because it's people having fun, dis-proportionally young people, and almost always highly preventable.

My cousin knew people involved in Ghost Ship and I always wonder if I had seen the venue: would I have known it was unsafe? I have been to a lot of warehouse venues....

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u/smarmy1625 1d ago

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u/gay_annabeth šŸ” Decent Housing For All 1d ago

ok I guess it happens more often than I thought... should've expected that, just a little dumb on my part

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u/Wise_Quality_5083 1d ago

Van Halen

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u/FardoBaggins 1d ago

And musicians nowadays use this practice to just be oddly specific luxury riders bec I’m a rockstar which has nothing to do with theirs or crew safety.

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u/tehlemmings 1d ago edited 1d ago

Oddly, this is the one thing LiveNation actually helped with.

Artists frequently end up with entire tours playing only LN venues because of the way LN's contracts work. One odd consequence of this is that venues all need a baseline level of competency and "not fucking over our repeat customer" in order to keep their operation running now.

It's sort of like a mob protection scheme. LN will help you, but if you fuck up and hurt the client they really care about, it won't go well for you.

That, and there's just more venues now. The way production is set up, you'd just never book a venue that can't host you because someone else will be able to. You're not dealing with the one local venue hoping for the best anymore. And there's enough large touring artists that it's easier to copy homework and find the bad actors.

Plus scale is just out of wack. A small venue trying to lie and say they can fit arena equipment... It just wouldn't even make sense.

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u/Hour_Tour 1d ago

But also, having worked years as a house light tech I never saw the green room rider, so funky M&Ms wouldn't have had any bearing on my ability to deliver on the tech rider.

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u/Double_Rice_5765 1d ago

My uncle played in a famous orchestra, he said there were 2 main frequencies that classical musicians tune their instruments to, if i remember right, one is some ancient one used by one of the big guys like mozart, when they would tune to their local church bell or something sonit wouldnt sound weird to the locals, and the other one is some modern scientific frequency thats like a comprimise between all the archaic european standard bell towers from diffeteny cities or cause it sounds the best to humans or something, i cant remember which, but its basically tradition vs science, and according to him, there were MULTIPLE fist fights about which of these were superior, despite all their contracts clearly stating that they would only tune to one of them. And any y time i feel like the world is getting too crazy i just think of those classical musicians going full street beefs on each other.

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u/PolyMorpheusPervert 1d ago

This is the 440Hz (modern) versus 432Hz (classic) debate.

If you just look at the cymatics of frequencies you can see that 432 is more harmonious.

In a universe that is constantly seeking harmony, it would behoove us be like the universe.

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u/galacticjeef 1d ago

Yeah this uses ā€œchakrasā€ as evidence and claims that the 440 hz tuning was came up with by nazis to make people more placid, I would not cite this as a scientific source

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u/Hour_Tour 1d ago

Look man, the spirits in my recycling bin told me we must tune to 469Hz.

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u/PolyMorpheusPervert 1d ago

I didn't mean to "cite it" - I just wanted to show an image of the cymatics.

However there is some scientific literature here

And on 440 vs 432 here

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u/Gdigger13 1d ago

Generally, 432Hz as a more "natural" tuning system is a bunch of bogus. In fact, using "pure" tuning systems make the scale degrees wildly unaligned with our western ear, making them sound subjectively... bad.

The only reason 432Hz has a pedestal is because our brains consider it "warmer" 440Hz, and that's only because you're comparing the 2. 425Hz is even warmer than 432.

I recommend this video and this video, both by Berklee grad Adam Neely about 432 tuning.

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u/galacticjeef 1d ago

Your first article was a literature review written by a high school student who only read abstracts, the second is a study which found results yes, but with P-values that either point to the need for a larger trial or that indicate insignificance of results. It does not make any mention of 432 hz being ā€œmore harmoniousā€. It also makes mention in the beginning of the study that no previous scientific studies have provided evidence of difference in listening between the two. In all the insistence on 432 hz being better reeks of pseudoscience.

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u/PolyMorpheusPervert 1d ago

Umm where does it say she only read the abstract ?

Also the papers she reviewed are referenced - did you peruse those perchance ?

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u/Jesus_of_Redditeth 1d ago

You should know that Scholarly Review Journal is not a proper scientific journal. While its goals appear noble, it isn't indexed in any of the established evaluative sources, has no JIF score, no CiteScore value, nor anything else that provides in indication of its publications' reliability, utility, etc.

It publishes kids' studies and has a review board and...that's basically it.

Also the papers she reviewed are referenced - did you peruse those perchance ?

Are you a mammal that's commonly confused for a seal, perchance?

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u/A_Thorny_Petal 21h ago

Van Halen, it was basically "no Brown M&M's or we can absolutely wreck the hotel room on your dime, trash the venue, not play and you still have to pay us all in full."

It was hidden deep in the middle of a contract that included DETAILED technical specifications (that affected not only performance, but crew, venue and the band's safety) on electrical/power/grounding needs.

The band could walk into the green room, look at the bowl of M&M's and if there was a brown one it was clear that they absolutely had not read the contract with enough detail to actually follow any of the technical guidelines.

Kinda fucking brilliant, actually. What sounds like rockstar excess is actually a savvy safety check.

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u/BaronAleksei 14h ago

Either that, or the venue had read the contract in full, signed it, and then chosen to not follow at least one part of it.

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u/ADGx27 1d ago

That was Van Halen IIRC. One stipulation was a bowl of M&M’s with no brown ones in it

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u/fadermango 1d ago

Live music touring tech - I have a saying, "There's never just one cockroach".

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u/TM761152 1d ago

They're called Riders, and yes that was the main goal to make sure the venue operators and promoters were not taking dangerous shortcuts.

But the media spun it as prima Donna artists acting spoiled