"Saturday" night tales from the music studio. This is my 15 watt Egnater Tweaker (and preferred settings). As the name suggests, you should tweak the fuck out of it. It was an amp designed by the legend Bruce Egnater. It is an amp almost specifically designed for you to mod it /n

Mine is modded - nominative determinism in action! Transformer replaced by a Mercury Magnetics job, bright cap clipped, switches bypassed, runs hot plate voltage into a pair of 6V6 tubes, through a Jensen 12 inch Blackbird speaker, and sounds like an exploding small block Fender.

One of the things I like about Australian politics as a laugh - though simultaneously hating it in my very bones as a participant - is the Multifunction Polis of stupidity that exists within and around it. Mob is right, we aren't a real place - but on more levels that we realise The profoundly stupid things that are our politics - who is up whose political bum, what is the government going to do about <insert exogenous shock> that by the time gov can do something it has passed. It goes on and on like filibuster against an IQ act

I can see this HAFF bill ending stupidly. It's Australia - of course it will.

The states come back from Natcab after their longish work on renters rights and there'll be a bunch of different regimes, but all incorporating stuff like... /n - replacing no-grounds with formalised just-grounds terminations
- formal negotiating frameworks for rental variation
- capped rental increases in designated areas
- miscellaneous rights on building standard maintenance.
etc

MCM - you can see people like him coming from a mile away in politics. The Tim-Wilson of the Greens. He will hurt them. He's demanding rent policy from the Feds - the States are currently organising that as they have constitutional power.

theguardian.com/australia-news…? Remember when he gave a whiteboard presentation of how the HAFF worked, and waxed lyrically about how you couldn't build a house for a couple of hundred thousand at most? The Haff isn't about that, it's about co-investment and lowering the yield curve to lower rents.

In April, national cabinet met where the states agreed to come back with a plan for renters rights via housing ministers, and housing supply expansion at state level via planning ministers and ALGA where Feds would provide extra funding. Today's 2 billion announcement is clearly part of the latter coming to fruition. Renters rights - a state based constitutional affair - will again be dealt with at the August meeting. Then there is the stalled HAFF - a completely separate thing. Also planning law reform to come

Niche thread - please ignore unless you follow me for the music stuff. - or if you've always asked yourself "how important is an anolog dry-through signal path as an option in the digital effects world when it comes to tube amps?" I spent the last two days (I'm mostly on a sabbatical at the moment apart from a few political things) measuring the SPL and impulse response function differences of transients between analog dry-through vs AD/DA conversions in guitar amp rigs.

There's lots of hot takes on vaccine hesitancy and how certain events are described as leading to explosions in hesitancy. Except they're all wrong. A mini thread using Melbourne Institute data from their Covid tracking program 1/n /Here's vaccine hesitancy for total population in Australia since Oct 2020. As Covid vaccines appeared, hesitancy grew before falling. Then something happened in early April to make it jump (Morrisons presser?), but since May has been falling again.

AstraZeneca is a governance failure. Actual governance - not screaming about erroneous horseshit by yahoos. ATAGI, with their focus on individualised health risk of immunisation (that's not a flaw BTW, it's a feature) professionally executed their role. 1/n 2/ The problem is that their official role wasn't compatible with the complexities of the total costs and benefits of Covid vaccination advice, where the costs aren't just individualised health risks, but much broader risks of human detriment......

Just a few things about hotel quarantine - because everyone seems to be talking shit to idiots and have learned nothing over 12 months. Which is not surprising in contemporary Australia where everything seems to have become a choose your own adventure fantasy /Thread 1. Just because the Feds can do something under the Constitution, doesn't mean they have to or should, because states can still legislate in the absence of Fed legislation. Do you want the Feds running quarantine? Really? That mob of useless incompetents who couldn't run a bath?

The Federal government was responsible for 4 things during the pandemic.

1. Border management - a no brainer, yet they still took too long to get their act together and were entirely responsible for the first wave. It wasn't NSW & the Ruby Princess, it was the Feds being useless 2. Quarantine - the States took it on as a stop gap measure as they had the resources to provide for the immediacy. The Feds have done nothing since, but play one state off against the other over a third best, temporary solution. We should have all Australians by home now.

Thread on how many people I can get to unfollow me via my views on 12 months of the Covid prism. The following isn't about normal people and debate, it's about those people who think they're important and special. This is a very important caveat. Not sure what was worse over the last 12 months. Everyone thinking they're epidemiologists, or epidemiologists thinking they're public policy specialists on everything from health system administration to apparently solving the vertical fiscal imbalance. Settle down.

Things the States need to learn from what's happening in Victoria, because this won't be the first time that these issues will occur over the next year /Thread. 1. The public aren't cretins, don't treat them as such. The difference between lockdowns (broad, area based, preventative infection control) and quarantine (specific locations under emergency) should be publicised as such. The panic saved by not using "quarantine" is illusory

Can we talk about border closures for a sec, because there's buckets of bullshit going on and people don't seem to know what happened early on. 1/n Firstly, the Feds say they have no advice to close borders. That's because the Feds don't get that advice, as it was agreed that border management was purely a state matter at the very beginning of the national cabinet process.

<rant> I look around at Australian politics at the moment and shake my head. On any specific example (big or small), if the ALP won't help themselves, why should they expect anyone else to step up and help them?

Let's have a couple of examples. First off, a minutia thing (yeah, so unfashionable, but it's the building blocks of reality). Then a bigger Fed thing.

I need to have a fucking rant I love this "ALP votes for tax Armageddon" Left fight. It's really healthy - Labor needs a bucket of shit poured on them, *even though* it was the only decision they could organisationally take at the moment as they're completely broken.

How about we run through some basic rules for working guitarists in any professional capacity - not youtube fantasies /Thread 1: Be bright - not as your parents wanted (though that helps), make your amp bright - you're playing in a mix, not by yourself. You have no place ordinarily being at 90 Hz. Bass and drums are there for a reason, give them space so you will be heard where you should be sitting.