I read your other post and thought I’d give you some insight about why you shouldn’t pursue another degree, especially in music. I did multiple degrees in music and I have never worked professionally in music. In fact, by the time I completed the program I hated playing my instrument and didn’t play for almost a decade.

The only reason to attend a university for music is if you need/want the credential or the ensemble experience. One uncomfortable truth is that most freshman piano students have over a decade of training before they start college. If you aren’t ready for the entrance audition now, then music school isn’t the way to go.

You can take private lessons (often from the same professors you’d have in school) for instrument technique, theory, repertoire, and ear training. You don’t need the university for that.

One thing people don’t like to talk about when it comes to music programs is that they are lifestyle degrees as much as they are intellectual degrees. There’s the classist element, the physical element (as a pianist or guitarist you can’t use your hands for any physical labor), and the financial element (instrument maintenance, performance quality instruments, travel, etc.).

Take the investment advice from others in this thread to set yourself up and then find some private teachers. You don’t need a degree to study music.

Edit: DM me if you want to talk about this more.

I can understand that and how it would be somewhat comforting to know you have a purpose. The thing that trips me up about this particular thought experiment is that once the realization sets in that one has implanted memories then naturally one has to doubt every single thought, feeling, and memory. That instability of self is terrifying to me (not to say that I have any way to confirm that I’m currently not a replicant).

This is an interesting take, I guess.

To fill you in, the replicants in Blade Runner are banned from Earth and are typically used in extremely dangerous lines of work like asteroid mining and space warfare, or sex work and mundane industrial labor. They aren’t considered people and are literally corporate property (i.e. slaves).

I personally side with the replicants who came back to earth to demand their makers “correct” the genetic time bomb they encoded into their DNA.

Which makes little sense because Conn-Selmer doesn’t just manufacture brass instruments and saxophones, they also exclusively import a lot of the European and Asian “alternatives” (i.e. illusions of choice). The Selmer (not Selmer (USA)) part of Conn-Selmer are made in France and like half of the other brands are Chinese or Japanese.

I mean, regardless of what happens, Conn-Selmer has a practical monopoly, but even though Conn-Selmer does manufacture in the US, they probably still rely on importing metals, right?

Musk’s obsession with an author like Heinlein, who wrote several books about a multidimensional polygamous space time sex cult with a dash of incest, makes a lot of sense.

The square Swiss flag works well because of the cross. If it were oblong, it would look unbalanced with the cross in the middle.

I’d take out the 13 stripes from the US flag and just use the naval jack.

In general I think any flag that is using seals, crests, or text should probably have a redesign, not necessarily to remove the icons, but to simplify them. (US state flags are the worst offenders here.)

Belize has a flag that looks like it could be the flag of a midwestern state.

The flag of Cyprus is just an outline of the island which, I feel, relies too much on cartography for its symbol. What if you’d never seen a map?

You’d take Scotland out, but leave Northern Ireland?

No disagreement here. I wasn’t necessarily advocating the idea, but it was interesting to explore it and “try it on” for a while when reading the book. I think there is some value in attempting to steer society in better directions, but disagree with rewriting history or purging culture to do so.

Just finished reading The Dispossessed and was going to comment similarly. It was fantastic read and surprisingly modern considering it was written in the 60s. Some of her contemporaries don’t have the same sort of timeless readability as Le Guin.

The key anarchist takeaways from The Dispossessed are the use of syndicates in lieu of corporate or government structures, no private ownership or equity, and the absence of law, elections, and criminal punishment. Committees exist for public discussion, but the outcome of that discussion is non-binding (although one may find themselves an outcast). Le Guin presents anarchy like libertarianism mixed with socialism: you are free to do as you please, but you are obligated to recognize your role in the social organism.

Le Guin also recognizes that anarchist thought is in some ways extremely foreign to all of our modes of thought, philosophy, and language. So she devises a world where the anarchists invent a new language to correct and remove “egoist” ideas. The society she develops revolted against a hyper-consumerist society, referred to as “propertarians,” and this drives much of the plot and dialogue: what does it mean to not be an egoist while still being human?; what is the limit of personal possession before becoming a propertarian?; what happens when your personal freedom and needs are trampled on by the social organism?; and how long can a non-hierarchical society last when it inevitably creates systems that begin to self-organize into hierarchies and bureaucracies?

The protagonist realizes that any revolution must remain perpetually in a state of revolution lest the people settle into inviolable customs that then calcify into law.