Sons of God, Table of Nations, Michael Heiser

 I've recently discovered Michael Heiser videos on YT. His approach to biblical history and theology was fascinating. He certainly tends towards the types of explanations I've long found convincing regarding Genesis 1-4, for example. But despite how much I've watched there's a hole that seems to exist in his teachings on the Tower of Babel and what he refers to as God's divorce from the nations.

"When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided all mankind, he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel."(Deuteronomy 32:8)

    He uses Deuteronomy 32:8 and fact that what is written as "sons of Israel" should be "sons of God" to show that its referring to spiritual beings, not people. He gives a strong argument on the wording itself. He also makes it clear that this references the tower of Babel incident. I can only agree with that. But I've yet to see him go back and fully compare the text in Genesis 10/11 to fully defend his point. Reading that text(at least the English), the only point where there is room for spiritual beings to be present is when God says "let us go down" in the plural. Yet there is no mention of dividing the nations by that plurality. What does exist is a full description of the descendants of Noah and the nations that arose from them. The assertion being that the sons began their own tribes, which became their own nations with their own tongues after the Tower of Babel incident.

    Watching another video from Heiser on the Trinity in the Old Testament, he mentioned something that brought me back to Babel. While explaining the use of the term Elohim to sometimes mean God, and sometimes mean things other than God, he talks about the term "sons of God" or "son of God" in the Old Testament. It has at times referred to spiritual beings, Israel, and kings. It's this latter that makes me question Heiser's take on Deuteronomy 32:8. Elsewhere, Heiser makes much hay over the use of the King and Prince motif, and uses this to argue that Deuteronomy 32:8 is in fact describing Principalities given to spiritual beings. But it looks like it could more directly describe the fact the descendants of Noah became kings over their people: i.e, using the same kings-as-"son of God" references found elsewhere in the OT to refer to the leaders of the tribes that became the scattered nations. "Sons of God" would indeed be the right wording for Deuteronomy 32:8, but in reference to earthly kings.

    If this is true, then his take on God's divorce from the nations reads a bit odd, though not necessarily wrong. The fact that God would refer to their leaders as "sons of God" at the same time he's saying, "go away, I'm gonna create a new People for myself through Abram and Sarai", sounds like God wants it both ways. It may be that this was a reference to the fact that while these nations are no longer following God, he's not using the term to mark them as his loyal servants but rather he's explicitly putting his stamp on his act of their creation. They didn't flee from God and call themselves kings, he called them kings and sent them off.

    Psalm 82's influence on reading both Genesis 10/11 and Deuteronomy 32:8 is unclear, but I do get where Heiser is coming from(at least from English): 

"I said, 'You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.' Arise, O God, judge the earth; for you shall inherit all the nations!"(Psalm 82:6-9)

You don't describe earthly kings dying like earthly kings as if it were news. Nor can I recall any OT king thinking he will literally live forever on earth. Every one of them expected to die like their fathers before them. The rest of Psalm 82, lacking knowledge of another possible context, certainly parallels the wording used in Deuteronomy 32:8, "When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance [...] But the Lord's portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage." Taken together it definitely looks as though God is taking back the nations from failed leaders. Even if he describes earthly leaders as "sons of God" elsewhere, what are learning from  the idea that they will die and fall like earthly leaders? Earlier in Psalm 82: "God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:" He seems to be addressing *these* gods, of course. But that tells us nothing. Are they earthly gods, or spiritual beings. And is this divine council the gods being judged? That's what Heiser seems to say. I think this is odd wording for such a case. God takes his place in the divine council, and judges the divine council? Or are the gods assembled before the divine council for judgement, then God walks in: "All Rise for the Honorable Judge Yahweh..."? I think Heiser gives references to the Divine council elsewhere, though those references escape me at the moment. I will have to continue this later. 

To this point though, Genesis lacks the explicit language of Deuteronomy 32:8 regarding dividing the nations by "sons of God", but *does* explicitly create the nations through the descendants of Noah. Deuteronomy uses "sons of God", but without enough context to say whether these refer to earthly kings or spiritual beings. Psalms 82 ups the ante by leaning towards non-earthly-kings being treated as earthly kings, along with God reclaiming the nations from those kings. So Psalms informs on Deuteronomy which informs on Genesis. 

Also, I do struggle with the proper way to read Psalm 82 and similar accounts. Is it a factual account of a vision or simply a poetic imagining? Elsewhere in the OT  we're given direct narration that "and <x> had a vision of...", and explicitly told the divine nature of the vision. Here, we have some vision of what occurred, then some commentary on it. We may take the vision as we would any other explicit revelation, but do we also accept Asaph's commentary and plea regarding that vision as divine messaging as well, or historical poetry? 

    The Bible is half historic and half divine. People talk and do as people talked and did. Intermixed are the divine truths. There's definitely a difference between what a character in the bible says, what the narrator says, and the direct words from God. If the narrator says, "and this happened", it happened: the word is inspired. If the narrator says, "<x>  said 'this happened', <x> definitely said "this happened", but did it happen? Context matters. Sometimes that context reveals a lie, sometimes it backs the assertion. Here, we're given a vision from a character, not backed by explicit narration, then we're given the character's assertion on the vision, not backed by context. No-one would claim there's a lie here, but is this a story of revealed truth or hopeful, poetic imaginings of justice with a more symbolic purpose? Being that the whole of the Bible is inspired, we know it has purpose. But as Heiser points out, the bible must be read from within the frame of reference for whom and when it was written. Is there any more context to apply here than, "it is inspired text, so presented without context it must be literal and that means there is a divine council that is judging non-human gods that failed?"

    Reading this again, it seems it could be read as Asaph himself mocking them as "you are gods. Sons of the Most High [...] nevertheless, like men you shall die..." May Asaph be having fun with the language used in Deuteronomy? He knows they're men, but he's mocking the fact they've forgot it themselves. After all, how many kings have imagined themselves actual deities?

AV1 Adventures

I've been trying to use AV1 for recompressing home videos and blurays, to keep them available on the network. My Home Videos are taken with a Moto G7 Potato, which requires a 4k 40MB HEVC source to look decent at all. After a light denoise filter, they look ok enough. My goal is to save these as ~3MB 1080p and ~1.5MB 480p for live use and archive the originals offline.  This is my first attempt at understanding AV1 quality. I had hoped to just jump in with suggested settings and get good results, but this was not the case.

Considering everything I've read, these were the assumptions I started out with:

1. Most use-cases need an RF between 25-35. Start at 35 and work from there.
2. Lower Resolutions need lower RF(higher quality settings), as there's less source data to work with to keep a good picture.
3. AV1 is a slower codec overall, but at the same speed as x264/x265 it will still give better results. AV1 will improve even more against x264/x265 if you encode with slower settings. Ergo, lacking another concern, AV1 should be used.
4. Constant Quality(RF) settings give better results than average bitrate, but source material will drastically impact final bitrate.
5. Mixed Messaging on 10bit. Some say use it in all cases; it has little overhead but helps reduce banding due to less rounding. Others say it's a waste on 8 bit source.
   

To this point, here are my experiences with those assumptions

1. Most use-cases need an RF between 25-35

    This remains to be seen. The Blu-ray source I'm using certainly does not bear this out. Using SVT-AVC Preset 5 RF25 only got to 1.5mbps, and had terrible issues with dark sections/shadows. This included flat blocks/banding across dark zones, and dancing blockiness in shadowed areas. Yet this used the highest quality in the normal range? I eventually used RF21 to get decent(but not really great), quality near 3mbps. A 720p encode at RF21 Preset 4 handled the dark sections better than the 1080p version, using almost half the bitrate(1.7mbps).

    I then tried starting with a far better source, a never compressed 10 second 1080p yuv 4:4:4 clip, encoded with 1080p RF21 Preset 5. It resulted in 60mbps video...wth. This does verify another assumption though: Constant Quality(RF) settings give better results than average bitrate, but source material will drastically impact final bitrate. Unfortunately, this seems like AV1 will be a rather finicky codec to use. In the past, using crf settings on x264, most would be around the same bitrate but some content would use as much as twice as expected. Going from 1.5mb to 60mb is a whole other story. I could use the maximum bitrate option, but that would end up with the highest quality sources always maxing out their bitrate(when in fact they should need the least, as they don't have prior artifacts to reencode against). It seems there's just no good encoding options that can be used  blindly against a set of videos.

2. Lower Resolutions need lower RF(higher quality settings)

 

    480p definitely needs lower RF than 720p and 1080p. I ended up using RF9 to get ~1.7mbps out of 480p, yet it still isn't as good as x264 abr at 1.7mbps on the dark areas(the rest of the frame beats x264 though). 

    720p needed RF21 to hit 1.7mb using 10bit with Preset 4. This looked better than the 480p 8 bit RF9 at ~1.7mb, and fully beat x264. It seems without preset 4, AV1 cannot handle dark zones as well as x264. This is a problem on 1080p as the encoding time for preset 4 is way too much on my antiquated system.

    1080p needed RF21 to hit 3.2mbps, using 10 bit with Preset 5. This video looked worse than the 720p version which used Preset 4 but half the bitrate. Once again, the brighter sections of the frame killed x264, but many dark sections contained distracting artifacts. It's sad that the RF setting does not result in any consistent output across other settings. It is apparently required for good results yet offers zero predictive power of actual results across inputs or other settings. Presenting this as a "Constant Quality" mode, we might understand that quality will differ with inputs and resolutions, while expecting the same quality output at differing sizes when changing only encoding speed through presets. Instead we get differing sizes *and* quality. 

    Clearly, this means any encode must be a cycle of encode, change settings, encode, change settings...until you find the quality/size tradeoff you're looking for. I don't yet understand why using bitrate alone for this can't do the same. Complexity does indeed spike for some scenes, requiring higher bitrates; a constant quality metric would handle that while an average bitrate over a short span may not. But isn't that just a matter of tuning the min/max bitrate range wider and doing better analysis with a first pass? Or perhaps selectively turning on slower encoder features during complex scenes?

    

3. AV1 is a slower codec overall, 

but at the same speed as x264/x265 it

 will still give better results. 

    This may in fact be the case if we don't include the dark scene problems. I have yet to have dark scenes and shadows exceed x264 without Preset 4 and RF mode, while using x264 in an abr mode with a similar encode time. This is also comparing 10bit AV1 vs 8 bit x264. These dark regions are such a nuisance that it ruins what really is a far crisper video overall. It might just be that AV1 without P4 or better is just not worth it; yet that is the opposite of every source I've read.

4. Constant Quality(RF) settings give

 better results than average bitrate...

     This has been the story of the day, so I won't belabor it here. It is true, but it is weird that it's true.

5. Mixed Messaging on 10bit. 

    I've seen cases where 10 bit did not help with banding or blockiness at all. I've seen cases where it definitely seemed to help, but resulted in a somewhat low detailed smooth region. It was less jarring than the banding, but not good. There is a limit to what can be done at low bitrates though, so tradeoffs must occur. So far the penalty for 10bit seems around 10% encoder speed, and insignificant on the output size. I do believe I'll use 10 bit for everything.  

Roku + Plex...what works, what doesn't

 Just my personal experience with what works, what doesn't, for my Roku device. I haven't found great up to date info on this subject so it's a bit trial and error between the various apps involved. I want my home videos encoded in the best format, but I also want them easily played with minimal transcoding. Short story so far, the Roku does not like opus in an mp4 container. This is unfortunate as some other targets(like browsers) don't play well with mkv format. AV1+Opus work fine enough in a webm container on both browser and Roku, so I'll probably have to switch to that for the time being. HEVC is a non-starter because of the lack of browser support. Annoyingly enough none of the options would play in the browser without transcoding, despite the fact I could play many of the files themselves directly in a <video> tag.

Tested on 2023-02-15, Roku Ultra 4800RW(11.50 build 4312-C2), Plex Server version 1.31.0.6654, Plex Roku version: 7.0.24.8154

720p, AV1+Opus in MP4: Transcodes to H264/aac in HLS. Setting to force direct play results in AV1 playing, no audio. I presume that even though it supports the AV1 stream in this case, since av1 is not yet a transcode target it forces the video to h264 just to get the audio fixed.

720p, AV1+Opus in MKV: Direct Play works. 

4K, AV1+AAC in MKV: Works.

4K, AV1+AAC in MP4: Works

4K, HEVC+AAC in MKV: Works

4K, HEVC+AAC in MP4: Works

720p, AV1+Opus in WebM: Works.

So it just chokes on the AV1+Opus in MP4 container.

Spotify Revenues and Listener Stats

    Spotify Wrapped 2022 year end listener statistics just became available. I very much like this summary, finding it a fun way to look at the last year of music. I sometimes find my most played songs surprising, and my most played artists aren't always who I'd have expected going into the year. But every time I start thinking about Spotify and listening time, I end up tilting back to the subject of Spotify revenues and artist payments. I love music, listening much of the day to something, when possible. My own Spotify stats showed I listened longer than 94% of Americans. This doesn't even include my still lengthy Pandora usage nor my (decreasingly relevant) personal music collection listening. 

    As so much of my daily enjoyment is music, I want Artists paid fairly for their creations so they keep creating. But as part of this, we should make sure payments for listening reflect actual listening...this is where I start finding Spotify and other Streaming revenue sharing...odd. 

    Spotify, like most streaming services, use a stream-sharing model where they add up all the streams for all the rights-holders, and then distribute to them based upon their share of total streams. There's other articles that cover this, easy to google for, so I encourage you to do this if you are unfamiliar with this model. But this means that if you stream very little, yet pay the same $10 month as everyone else, most of your money goes to artists you may never have listened to.

    My top five songs this year were all niche songs with comparatively few global listeners. Some groups I currently enjoy have fewer than 1000 monthly listeners. I had a total of around 58k listening minutes. If songs average 3.2 minutes, this is over 18125 songs streamed. Using an oft-cited average of $0.004 per stream, this means my $10 a month fee payed about $72.50 to rights-holders. Yet this is only 60% of what I paid to spotify. Supposedly they pay nearly 70% of total revenue to rights-holders. But I'm in the top 6% of U.S. listeners.  Assuming Spotify makes more from paying users than free-accounts with advertising, shouldn't I expect my streams' estimated payments to be far higher than the Spotify average, perhaps even exceeding my total payments to Spotify? But it isn't.     Now take another individual, who streamed around 23k minutes, more than 64% of other Americans. Using the same song duration and per stream estimates we have around $29 of their revenue going to the artists they streamed. Potentially $120/year of fees and only 25% going to who they listened to. One thing this doesn't take into account is that, being well above the majority of users in average listening time, we both likely skew the statistics in favor of our selected artists. But since our top artists or top songs are not themselves necessarily(or in my case, even likely) in the top 50% of songs streamed, this skewing may only help get our favored artists back to par. The situation is far worse for those who stream in the bottom 50% of users *and* listen to obscure music. Under the stream-sharing model most of their money *must* be going to artists they would never listen to. The argument in favor of this weird system seems to be that the more listeners you bring in the more the total pot grows, and so everyone gets paid more in the end, and on average artists are paid similarly for their streams. On Average.

    We would never allow this model for any industry where products shipped have actual cost. It would be ludicrous! You're going to build something, consumers will pay a subscription to get it, but the more products your competitor ships, the less you make? To earn more from that common revenue pool you have to ship more product, making even less per-product than before? If your opponent builds a cheaper product and ships far more of them to inexperienced consumers who are ok with mediocrity so long as it comes in a flashy box, you make less still? Again, ludicrous. But that's where our music industry is at.

    Unknown niche artists enjoyed by those users who don't listen to the "Today's Top 40 because we're promoting it endlessly" playlists, are only going to see their "fair share" of the revenue if their listeners also keep the music going longer than the average listener. Of course there's no reason to believe that your average niche listener listens to less(or more) music than your average top-40 listener, streaming companies don't actually pay per stream, and we're only aware of the averages, but I don't know how anyone can argue this isn't sketchy. Unfortunately the numbers aren't public to see exactly what happens here but it all feels very "off". I do know of at least one user who has many times my total listening time, and was stated as in the top 0.1% of U.S. listeners by time. If my top 6% of listening time can't even get my average pay per stream to reach that average 70% of revenue, does it mean that the top 50% of streams are actually condensed in the top 5% of users? If so, the bottom 95% of users are potentially all subsidizing artists they may never listen to, and to a huge extent. I'm not arguing anything underhanded is going on, though it isn't hard to see how this system can be abused by bot-driven fake listeners. But in any case, this is far too opaque of a system for a very centrally-controlled industry to operate. It may actually be true that the vast majority of rights-holders and their listeners would be better served by excluding these top users from their financial universe. If those heaviest users don't correlate to the listening habits of the 95% of streamers, why should those streamers send their money to artists they don't actually enjoy? I certainly would like to know that when I pay for music, I'm supporting the artists that I want to hear more from.

    We have no idea who we're actually paying to support. Sure, users pay for access to the library of songs, and get access to the library of songs. Perhaps you could argue that any other considerations are beyond the users' care as a consumer. But clearly, they're not. We're told not to pirate because we need to support the creators we enjoy. We're told we need long copyright terms to support the creators we enjoy.  But then when we actually pay, we don't know if we're actually supporting the creators we enjoy? Please. This is not right. A strict per-stream model would be opposed by users as they expect unlimited play at this point. Perhaps just exposing the private details of these contracts would be enough to keep users informed on whether they're paying the right amount for what they're getting. That would be a nice start in any case. 

    Aside from that, what could we support instead? If there is an optimally fair and obviously just model, I can't think of it. Part of this is due to what I mentioned earlier: no industry where products shipped have actual cost would have tried what we have with streaming. That's because music, like all copyrighted material, is not actual product. We had to grant Congress an express right to create an artificial "property right". And for the sake of encouraging creativity, it is surely needed(even if it is too long a duration). But there's little sense in saying recorded music should make more money if it's played more. If I wear boots twice a year during heavy rains, that doesn't mean they are only 0.5% as valuable as the street shoes I wear everyday, their makers shouldn't get paid $2.75 while street shoes get $47.25. But that's how we value recorded media. It is nonsensical.

    For those that want to argue that "more popular" correlates to higher quality, more skilled musicians, etc, and we certainly do pay higher amounts for higher quality products built by more skilled workers, the lack of per-play "unit cost" and natural time limits users have to search and listen skews any real impact that quality may have on listening decisions. The negligible cost per copy of recorded music means it doesn't play by the same rules as real merchandise, governed by supply, demand, and competition between price and value. It's true that bad songs are not very likely to become popular; but that does not mean unpopular songs are likely to be bad. If 100 great song exist, and everyone has time for 10. Those first few to be hyped as "great"(either by listeners or advertisers), will end up with more listens than the rest of the great songs. If we're in a world of abundant, quality music, listen counts are governed by discoverability and familiarity, not quality. If our goal with copyright is to encourage the creation of more good content, it is counterproductive to use a payment model that doesn't take creation cost, effort, and quality into account. It especially doesn't make sense to detach an individual listeners' payment from their payments to artists. 

    Since we're clearly going to keep the unlimited models, and I don't know of a way to objectively define quality and value to an individual song without referencing skewed global popularity, it would be nice to know we're using a payment scheme where revenue from an individual customer equates to payment for the product they consume. If Spotify is going to pay 70% of revenue to rights-holders, then 70% of what you as an individual pay should go to the artists you as an individual listen to. If a short-duration listener pays the same $10 as a long duration listener, then they have already declared that these fewer listens have a greater value *to them*. Lacking normal market forces of supply, demand, and quality vs cost considerations, individual user stream-share pricing is the most logical way to gauge value per song. If artists want a piece of the pie you're paying for, they need to make something you individually want and make sure you individually find it.

    Due to the tenuous relationship that copyright has with cost and value, and the artificial nature of these copyrights to begin with, we may need Congress to re-balance the playing field so all creators get a sustainable portion of the pie. Keeping in mind we want to do this without turning streaming into a "make work" effort any untalented person can claim a piece of, we should start by dictating that subscription streaming  revenues must be transparent to both users and rights-holders. At least then we can know what content our fees are actually funding. Beyond that we need to be more careful with stepping on potentially creative business models while ensuring new or unknown creators are not dissuaded from creating or forced to accept non-competitive pay structures due to the weight of industry monoliths. 

    Complex and private payment structures, with numerous side contracts between the largest players, with revenue sharing hidden from the paying users who have limited real competition to choose from, are ripe for abuses that harm both the consumers and the creators.A reasonable regulation might be that any "payment pool" scheme be governed by exactly one, public contract with accountability access open to all signatories, and that any side-deals between the platform and other content owners cannot include terms that share aspects in common with that pool. For example, you cannot use 50% of your revenue for a shared pool divided by stream count, but then pay some content providers even more money per stream from another pool of 20%. You would, however, be able to create two pools that have overlapping content but are common to all signatories. For example, 50% of revenue pooled by plays for all content, 20% of revenue pooled by play for content with original release dates newer than 5 years(notice all content owners can fit into both pools equally, but it still can reward "freshness" of content and new creativity). Those "popularity suggests quality" types might object that rights-holders representing the largest names may object to their content being paid the same rate as the more amateur creators. In such a case, it would not be illegal for them to have a side deal where their group gets a fixed portion of revenue(say from 5% of total revenue while 50% goes to the "pool"), only that they cannot base that share on an aspect used to divide the 50% pool(like stream counts, or total minutes). And such a contract would have to be disclosed publicly. In an industry governed by giants, individual content creators should know the rules that impact their value, and users should know exactly who they're funding. 

    Most performers see the bulk of their recorded-media profits in a short window if they reach mass-market awareness, and the rest of their revenue comes from live performances that are more valuable to them the more their recorded music is shared and their fan-base enlarged. The public is arguably harmed by long copyright terms diverting money for recorded music to the biggest, well established and long profitable names while spreading far too little to the lesser known or new artists who would most benefit from higher "per play" fees. Copyright is about encouraging creation, not blindly creating a few ultra-rich celebrities.

    Aside from what we should do(limit copyright terms to a narrow 20 year window, more in line with the original purpose of encouraging creation of new works, rather than a method of locking our shared popular culture behind 120 year long paywalls), the best option would probably be to mandate that while rights-holders maintain a full monopoly over the right to profit from their works, they may only license them on either a strict ownership or universally equivalent per stream basis. They can set whatever price they wish. If they think their songs are worth 10x that of other songs, they can charge it. But it must be knowable to the user how listening to that music is impacting them. Users would choose the streaming platform which they found best suited to their functional needs, and it could access the entirety of the world of music. At this point, it would be up to the platform to help the user choose what makes most sense for them. A good platform helps the user extend their listening budget while finding the best songs for their taste. Users might hate to see unlimited streaming go away, but as they clamor for more content at a fair price, the market system would finally be allowed to work properly on recorded music, something it hasn't been allowed to do pretty much ever in history. Switching to such rules would ensure complex and opaque acquisition agreements cannot hamper the ability of users to know who they're funding or harm smaller creators who lack the clout for fair contracts. Obviously, I don't hold out hope for such a rule to ever come into being, but it's where we should try to head.

 

Taxpayers and Loan Forgiveness

    A common, long-touted belief from Republicans is that lowering the tax rate is good for the economy: the largest benefit being it spurs investment leading to future years in which the lower tax rate is gathered across a larger economy. In the end the government ends up taking in more money than it would have with the higher rates. Democrats push back on this largely by citing the short-term increase in deficit that was traded in order to give "wealthy people a tax break". They're not wrong. In 2019, the top 50% of taxpayers paid 97% of taxes. The top 1% of earners paid 38% of all income taxes, exceeding those paid by the lower 90% combined(https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income-tax-data/). Any tax cut of significance is going to go overwhelmingly to the top half of earners. Republicans defend this on the grounds that these are precisely the people who will make those investments that will result in more jobs, higher wages, and in the long term more tax revenue. Republicans are not wrong, either. Tax cuts work, and if you want successful business owners or to invest more of their money in creating new, higher paying jobs, those successful business owners need to keep their own money. The same goes for high-earning non-business owners too; they're very likely to invest their money, not hoard it.

    But right now we're focused not on tax cuts, but federal student loan forgiveness: Democrats are talking of forgiving $10k of student loans for those making under $125k a year. Republicans are pushing back by claiming this will increase inflation, as well as shift the burden of those loans from a huge number of students who attended post-graduate school, onto taxpayers at large, a majority of whom never attended college. Republicans exclaim, "Plumbers and Truck Drivers will be paying the student loans of Doctors and Lawyers." 

    This certainly sounds unfair, but the reality is the young "Doctors and Lawyers" who are being helped by this will end up paying vastly more in taxes than even high-earning Plumbers and Truck drivers in the long run. The "Doctors and Lawyers" helped are typically early-career graduates with good wages but heavy debt. They will become very high earning mid-career soon enough, and pay back more than their "fair share". But this "Doctors and Lawyers" claim misses the fact that many(perhaps most) of those with student loans are in more modest careers. The bulk of the people helped will be far less elite than this "doctors and lawyers" subset, and the "Doctors and Lawyers" subset will retain much of their debt and pay it back in due time. We've already established that the top 1% pays more than the bottom 90% in income taxes. It's true that professional tradesman like Plumbers, who likely have never taken student loans, may be part of the top 50% of earners and so part of the 97% of taxes paid; but they're hardly going to shoulder the cost of any loan forgiveness by any real measure. Their taxes don't rise immediately because we have some additional spending. In the end, the bulk of this forgiveness will still be paid for by the wealthiest 10% among us...same as the rest of our government expenditures. Our public debt is already massive, this won't on its own be a significant new burden. This isn't an endorsement of the forgiveness plan, but the Republican objection on the grounds that it shifts burden to the non-college-uneducated rings hollow in light of who actually pays the bulk of the taxes in the long run: those same highest-earning college educated in their mid and late careers.

    Education level is still one of the greatest indicators of future income potential: For those aged 25-34 working full time, median incomes for those with a Bachelors degree is nearly $60K a year, while median income for those with no college is still under $40k a year(https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2022/06/01/new-report-shows-college-degree-continues-to-provide-better-employment-prospects-and-higher-income/?sh=e8e3b9c23580). While hard working tradesmen may jump far ahead of the median income for their education level, those in the top 10% are surely well over-represented by college education. Shifting the burden from educated debtors to the taxpayers at large may seem unfair, but in the long run it won't change much regarding who pays the balance: those with the advanced degrees, and therefore highest earnings potential, will end up paying a far greater share of their income as taxes than the average earner. Many fields still have a lack of candidates available to fill positions requiring advanced degrees, and it is in the taxpayers interest to encourage people to attempt these degree paths; ensuring you don't leave undergraduate level saddled with debt is a good way to do so. The fact that not everyone chose to take on debt does not immediately make it wrong to help ease the burden of those who did, especially when the nation's economy and our tax-base specifically is dependent upon the success of those future high-earning graduates(and the nation's policies are what ran up the costs of education in the first place). Even if we accept that loan forgiveness is wrong or unfair, the Republican's insistence on arguing this particular angle may do more harm than good in the long run as it has the appearance of conflicting with the pro tax cut arguments which permit us to cut taxes on the wealthy while poverty exists: there's a significant difference in this scenario regarding the perceived wealthy keeping education money vs earnings, but it still boils down to "why do you need more money if you're a high earner?" The fact remains that high debt vs earnings are harmful to everyone regardless of whether you're low debt with low wages or high debt with high wages, and a nation that expects predominantly college educated, high earners mid to late career to support most of our nation's general spending should perhaps be a little more understanding when expecting them to also take full personal financial risk and the stress that accompanies it to get there.

    Fairness aside, it is still hard to look past the simple truth that one should pay their own debts. Democrats increasingly view debts as a sign the system is flawed to start: you shouldn't have to go in debt for food/housing/education/healthcare/etc, and Republicans tend to view these expenses as just part of life and you alone are responsible for your own life. At the same time, Republicans acknowledge that all of those costs have been raised due to bad policy, education and healthcare especially. We're in a world where the best way to reach financial success is to get a valuable degree; but the cost of that degree has been pushed out of reach of working class families without taking debt or subsidy. If you do take that debt to get the degree, you're left with the potential for years of stress and worry, even if making good wages. Yet this is a reality we all share. Every one of us makes these same decisions between taking debt for education or not.

    How do we compare this to, say, credit card debt and bankruptcy? It's certainly different, as these loan forgiveness recipients are  not bankrupt. They may be stressed and living paycheck to paycheck, but not bankrupt. In fact, with the income dependent repayment plans available for most of these loans, borrowers clearly have much more of a safety net than with consumer debt(including healthcare debt).  In the case where you do declare bankruptcy on consumer debt, the debt isn't put on to the taxpayers; the lender takes a loss. Since the government *is* the lender in these Student loans, though, taxpayers are indeed the proper ones to take the loss should you need bankruptcy protections(which you can't actually get with a student loan, at least not in the traditional sense; you're stuck with those loans till they're repaid or forgiven). Further, credit is usually issued based upon perceived ability to pay, while student loans are issued without regard to ability to pay, as you're hoping the student learns enough to get a good job later, but certainly cannot pay at loan disbursement. An educated population is critical for our economy, so there's a taxpayer benefit to paying for college that doesn't exist with consumer credit. All in all, student loan debt has fundamental differences to most other debts. This debt was issued by the government for benefits that exceed those of the individual debtor. For these reasons, the decision on how to dispose of this debt is indeed a valid matter of policy, while the decision to dispose of credit card debt would not be. If the party in charge believes that maintaining this debt is detrimental to the nation and we are better served by disposing of it, and they have the regulatory room to act upon such belief, then we should not view it as if they paid off someone's house, car, or credit cards. One comparison being made by the left is to PPP loans. Many Republican business owners took PPP loans during COVID-19 lockdowns, and then had those forgiven. This was of course an emergency measure because governments had forcibly closed businesses. PPP forgiveness was baked into the loans from the start though, with requirements the business must meet; this differs from the student loans. Yet, since the student loans are a matter of policy, not private contract, then there's not much difference between rewriting the rules later or at the start; both are valid policy assuming the rule change was otherwise legal.

    What does student loan forgiveness say about the recipients, if anything? Republicans are already referring to them as "deadbeats" and the like. Should they be criticized for taking advantage of a policy decision such as this, or asking for it in the first place? There are many who believe that subsidizing education for the poor through grants is wrong and taxpayers shouldn't be helping people fund their careers at all. There are poor who are reluctant to take advantage of public benefits such as education grants because they feel like they're saying to the taxpayers, "Yes, I'm a charity case; please pay for me." Are these reasonable or good beliefs? Others, like the Democratic platform, believe that students who wish to continue education in adulthood shouldn't be made to pay when college education is a benefit to society and an increasing requirement for employment. While much thought is and should be given towards fairness to plumbers and truck drivers, there's only so many of those we actually, and many jobs require advanced education. Outside of education, our government offers subsidies in countless ways, often with bipartisan support, to entities we believe serve a public purpose. We don't call farmers deadbeats when the government subsidizes their costs; they get that Bipartisan support instead. Much of these subsidies go to the large, profitable farming corporations. Somewhere along the line we wrote them into the budget and carried on with life. The $20B+ Space Launch System has functioned as a gigantic subsidy for manufacturers involved previously in the Space Shuttle project...despite the fact it's an inferior and overpriced rocket to what could have been built, it gets bipartisan support. This includes highly paid engineers, kept employed by a Congress that decides they *want* to keep those companies around and supported by Republicans who find it politically prudent to keep their home-town companies supported by taxpayers despite being years late and over budget. The list of subsidies is massive, and is not limited to low-income individuals or failing companies. How can we justify calling student loan recipients deadbeats, when so many businesses and engineers are kept employed by the government on under-performing, perpetually late, busy work?

    Republicans need to come to grips with reality: Democrats ran campaigns nationally which included student loan forgiveness as a core promise, and they won. If Loan Forgiveness could happen, Loan Forgiveness was going to happen. Yes, this is a vote buying scheme. By doubling down on the most divisive of objections to the forgiveness, pitting "working-class" against "college educated" under superficially thin fairness arguments that don't stand up against the reality of our tax system and the countless other subsidies we already give, Republicans are trying hard to lose the next election too. It will be years before the beneficiaries of loan forgiveness personally suffer due to the collapse in college financing and excessive inflation it will cause. They will remember their sudden reduction in stress as their loans were reduced or eliminated by Democrats, and how much Republicans denigrated them during the process. Republicans are hardening their base against a very flawed policy, but not expanding the base to fight it. 

    Loan Forgiveness will be damaging to the nation. Since the taxpayer fairness argument against loan forgiveness is flawed, if not wrong, Republicans should focus on the remaining arguments; additional spending for loan forgiveness will increase inflation, and loan forgiveness will undermine college financing going forward as every future student will expect to not repay their loan. The latter is the most convincing argument. In fact, it is possibly intended. Democrats have been pushing for "free college" for years now, and effectively backdooring free college through future expectations of loan forgiveness is a good way to achieve what Congress has refused to pass. It is also an amazing handout to the college industry at large as Students will no longer feel the need to keep their costs under control: they can take and spend any loan money they're offered. Costs will rise because the money seems "free", money offered will rise because average costs have risen. With no expectation of loan repayment, we may eventually be forced to limit the loans to those most likely to succeed, knowing the taxpayers will be repaid through future income tax, hurting low income students who have the most to overcome on the way to a degree and post-degree employment. Eventually the system will burn to the ground, and Republicans are not prepared to argue for its replacement. 

    Republicans have thus far said if you take out risky loans as an 18 year old in hopes of a solid future, you're to expect no help as you struggle with that debt and the stress debt brings. While at the same time Republicans argue that the policy of offering those loans broadly has driven up the cost of education, increasing the debt students must take to become educated. For their trouble, our income tax system will then take a massive percent of the earnings from the college educated if they do succeed. Republicans are then stoking hostility towards the college educated debtors for wanting debt relief. Whenever tax policy comes up, Republicans argue(rightly) that the small tax base biased heavily towards the most successful earners is unstable and encourages class based hostility, and therefore the tax base should be broadened and taxes rates flattened. Under such a policy it might make sense to let people subsume the full risk of their personal choice to an education, when they're not being taxed excessively should they eventually succeed. But we're not there. Far from it, and generating hostility between classes is not a way to get there. Plus, while both moral and economically sound, it's hard to tell the voting base, "we want you to pay a higher percentage of the national budget, so the wealthy can keep more of their money they earned through all that risk they took...it'll help grow everyone's wages in the end, I swear". What future do Republicans argue for then, regarding higher education? The status quo sucks: high costs, high taxes, high risk...but eventually higher wages(hopefully). Democrats push flawed policy to address one part of it, and Republicans respond with hostility towards those its helping, and no real solutions.

    

    I've never been this embarrassed and frustrated by America, and really the whole western World. We pulled out of Afghanistan knowing full well their government would collapse, wrong only about the speed it would happen. Ignore for a moment the Americans and Afghan allies trapped there because of the speed of the collapse. Think about the everyday citizens. Already there's reports of a woman shot in the street because she wasn't wearing a head covering, girls already being prevented from going to school, neighborhoods disarmed so citizens can't defend themselves. We know how this ends; a country of 38 million will become enslaved to "Sharia Law", they'll once again live in a world where every day they're at risk of dying if they dare speak an opinion contrary to fundamentalist Islam.

    America has spent the last several years bitching about "systemic discrimination", with Democrats ensuring us Trump wants to make "The Handmaid's Tale" come to life. But it was Biden who has actually (and knowingly) put a country of women back at the mercy of the ruthless, woman-enslaving, child-raping Taliban. And we've heard <crickets> from the Democratic base. The Taliban will kill woman at will, and yet the Democrats have no desire to save them. The Taliban will kill gays outright, and yet the party of LGBTQ+ can't be bothered to act. The party that complains America is too sexist has turned their backs on girls our troops have protected from birth, letting them be forced away from schools or even worse, into "marriages" to Taliban fighters(i.e, raped). The party that thinks that America built its wealth upon the abuse of the poor has no desire to spend a small portion of our annual budget to at least try to bring security and freedom to 38 million people in one of the worst areas of the world. The party that regularly slanders our military as full of right-wing racists thinks the security of 38 million people is worth less than keeping a few thousand American troops there continuously.

    While Democrats are especially hypocritical due to the nature of their untrue attacks on Republicans, Republicans are far from innocent in this. Trump ran on a "Leave Afghanistan" platform. Republicans have elected Congressional members opposed to any so called "nation building" at all, such as Rand Paul. According to them, we should have bombed Afghanistan and then just let them be, and we'd be better off. This was always an idiotic position, proven more false as time goes by specifically due to how hard it was to fight Al-Qaeda and the Taliban with troops *in* the country. Dropping a few bombs and leaving would have allowed them to continue planning and launching more attacks. Then, GOP voters nominated Trump and got him into office. Trump kept his word and created the plan to leave(conditionally), despite the fact there was no expectation Afghanistan was ready for us to leave. Biden ignored that plan and simply left in chaos. But voters got what they asked for either way. A majority of Americans wanted to leave, but were either too uncaring or ignorant to consider the impact on millions of innocent people, or the impact on our security when the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are free to launch new attacks with near zero ability for the U.S. target them at the source beforehand.

    And the rest of the world? I expected their condemnations of the Taliban and the U.S. alike as we dealed Afghanistan right into chaos, but they don't seem to care enough either. Perhaps they're too afraid to condemn us because then the question will become, "If The U.S. won't do it, why don't you send your military in force and save the Afghans instead?". Nope. Virtual silence.

    The West failed by choice. We lost an average of 180 soldiers a year to Afghanistan, every one a tragedy; but that number had dropped significantly  since combat operations were turned over to the Afghan military. It wasn't going great for Afghanistan, but it was going. Despite huge losses of their own they had a military willing to fight so long as we were there to help. When it turned hopeless upon our exit, they crumbled. 

    From this point forward, every Taliban murder of a former Afghan ally, or stoning of a woman for violating Sharia Law, or forced "marriage" of a barely teenage girl to a Taliban fighter, the West had a role. We walked away. Shame on us.

Experiences with Rain-Bird 5000, K-Rain 4-inch/5-inch, Orbit Voyager II

 I've been doing repairs on my in-ground sprinklers, and preparing to expand sprinklers to areas not currently under a proper watering regime. I have some areas I've moved mobile sprinklers to, which is both annoying and water inefficient; instead of being watered in the wee hours of the morning like my automatic sprinklers, for a fixed and optimal period of time, they're watered in the afternoon from whenever I get around to it, to whenever I wake up and say "gah, I forgot the sprinkler again!". 

    Trying to resolve some issues with reach on the existing system, I had tested a K-Rain four-inch sprinkler head. I had previously had good luck with a K-Rain 5 inch model that I used on a spike, for a large semi-circle area. The four-inch didn't work well in that location so I moved it to a spike as a mobile sprinkler. I have it watering an approximate 60x30 strip, but this requires me to move it three times for complete watering. I don't like this. Since I was dissatisfied with the K-Rain 4-incher, I bought an Orbit Voyager II to test. Specific reasons for buying it were the distance was rated higher than the others, and the nozzles appeared possibly compatible with the Rain-Bird 42SA and 5000 series, though I haven't verified this yet, and it was cheaper than the Rain-Bird 5000. Again, this is being used above ground for now: I could have bought a gear-driven above-ground sprinkler but I assume I will eventually move these below ground in the near future.

    So to this point I've used the Rain-bird 5000 series(older ones, ~ 18 years old), K-Rain 5-inch, K-Rain 4-inch, and Orbit Voyager II. Cost was a primary driver of experimentation, with the exception of one location where I needed different coverage. If I could reduce a $15 head to $10, it would make a reasonable difference if I'm installing a new in-ground section. Here's my experience with each.

• Rain-Bird 5000: great sprinkler. I started replacing them after about 13 years as they began to fail. None of this failure was their fault; the soil-line raising over that period caused some to be sunk under-ground and get flooded with mud constantly. I had coverage issues with one area that was just never quite right, and so moved away from this head in attempts to fix it. I ended up moving the head and replacing it with a new Rain-Bird 5000. They've changed the design of the nozzle in the intervening years but I think they all still interchange. I feel like they've improved these over the years. I recall our oldest ones being difficult to adjust: requiring setting the left-position which is fixed, screwing the cap down, then adjusting the right-position; this is finicky if there's any movement in the sprinkler body itself(as there was with the flex-hose they were attached to the PVC with). With the last one I was able to grip the extended part of the sprinkler and move it as needed, then do pattern adjustment as normal.
  
• K-Rain 5-inch: Bought for above-ground usage on a spike to test covering an irregular but approximately 55'x25' area. This worked quite well, actually. I'm watering a not-quite trapezoidal area with a semi-circle spray, so it's less than perfect coverage, and truly needs 4-6 heads i think, but since it's a less-than-manicured section it has worked well enough for now. I'd like to use different nozzles but the big-box stores I frequent don't carry them and they appear incompatible with Rain-Bird. If it wasn't for the lack of support from the store, I'd choose these for large coverage areas. They're super-easy to adjust. I do worry about their durability, but haven't had issues yet.
• K-Rain 4-inch: Like their 5-inch brothers, the spray nozzles are hard to find. It seemed to drip a lot more water near the spray head than I've seen with other sprinklers, flooding the area near the sprinkler too bad to leave as an in-ground sprinkler. I moved it to a spike. After less than one season, it stopped rotating properly. I won't buy these again.
  
• Orbit Voyager II: This seems to have the difficulty of adjusting like the original Rain-Bird 5000s. The distance is better, and I feel like it has possibly better coverage in the middle of its spray range. The apparent inability to adjust the fixed-side pointing after installation means I won't likely use these going forward.

I hate when you spend much effort looking for better alternatives, then find out you had the best all along. After experimenting with the others, I'm back to the good-old Rain-Bird 5000s. They're the priciest of the ones I've tried, but the price difference of the others do not make up for their shortcomings.