I grew in the area most hit by Chernobyl fallout in Europe. The disfigured newborn kids who didn't make it would probably not share your view.
My girlfriends first older brother was one of those babies, the second one survived but is disfigured and needs serious care to live. I had three such kids in my first class at school, four different ones in my second and a sizeable number of parents whose kids didn't survive childbirth. Not being allowed to eat certain mushrooms or digging in the woods was the easier part.
So this may be a bit more tangible for some people than for others.
There are a number of pro-nuclear advocates on this page who can’t just engage in good faith but instead dismiss and deride their interlocutors as “crazy”, “paranoid”, “fear mongers“. It’s infuriating because the origins of anti-nuclear sentiments are often plain and perfectly understandable, as your poignant anecdotes illustrate.
I'd get angry with them, but at this point the renewable wave is so overwhelming and unstoppable that they are just screaming into the void. I know they are set up for bitter disappointment, having constructed a false defensive narrative to prop up their world view, and I kind of pity them.
There are real reasons to do that, even if you like tube amps:
- Tube amps need regular tube swaps. For a small guitar Combo a set of tubes (3× preamp + 2× power amp) can cost between 100 to 150 Euros. If you're a poor musician that is a factor
- Tube amps use heavy power and output transformers. If you ever had to carry an Ampeg SVT (36 kg for 300W) you will cherish the idea of a 0.25 kg 500W class D amp. If you're a touring musician that is a factor
- Tube amps are limited in terms of sound. While this could be seen both as a feature and a bug, if you want to recall the perfect settings for each song as a touring musician, tube amps are not the right choice unless you have a horde of roadies and technicians
This is why amp sims have become more popular in the recent years with people who play music for a living.
That being said, if you're in a simple band and you want the sound of a tube amp, a tube amp gives it to you pretty reliably without making you drown in options or giving you the feeling your gear is outdated every other year, since it is outdated since decades anyways. A tube amp also needs no firmware updates and requires no subscription and has less parts that can break.
What you say is true if we operate gear within specs. In guitar amplifiers when tubes are overdriven tubes, they still matter. Only in the past decade (circa) digital guitar amp simulations started to become sufficiently advanced to deliver convincing organic sounding results on that front, with DSP-based hardware that is suitable for the stage.
But if all you want is the sound of an overdriven tube amplifier, getting yourself an overdriven tube amplifier is still the least complex option technically, in terms of parts count, repairability, etc. It is a primitive technology, but it is also well known and works. It also has no menus, minimal settings and doesn't need firmware updates or registered accounts.
Personally I use both Class D and transistor based audio amplifiers for my musician life, since those are much lighter to carry for the same power and work for the type of sound I want.
If we talk Hifi unless they also want to overdrive the sound (they usually don't), tube amps are useless. The distortion figures of good transistor amps are much better, class D is making massive leaps in the recent years and has reached indistinguishable quality levels for a while now. These people should focus on room acoustics.
I bought new vacuum tubes just last week. For guitar amplifiers vacuum tubes are still pretty common. If you want a simple, horribly inefficient circuit that sounds good with an electric guitar vacuum tubes are great, mostly because they overdrive a bit more gracefully than transistors.
For my daily band life my amp of choice is a Roland JC-120 for guitar (transistor amp) and a Eich T-500 (class D) for Bass.
Can't wait for class D to catch up to tubes, I really don't dig having to carry 30kg amps around.
Our IT department has a machine called jukebox hooked up to a sound system. Since it runs a music player daemon everybody in the IT department can control the jukebox from their own frontend, phone or whatever.
Technically you could achieve the same with a web frontend, but then you're limited to that UI. A music player daemon is agnostic to the UI, meaning there can be different UIs or you can add music via command line, text interfaces etc.
Saying being a programmer is about writing code is a bit like saying being an artist is about drawing lines on a canvas.
Yeah technically drawing lines on canvases may be an very important part of being a painter, but it is hardly the core of what makes or breaks great art.
When there is drama as far as I can tell he always had pretty solid reasons to be dramatic. It isn't drama when you have real reasons. Drama implies making shit up. Point to the shit he made up. Go ahead. Be specific.
Your accusation there makes it sound like he makes up some minor personal issues and blows them up as rage bait. As if the lock in and enshittification he advocates against are just his personal opinion. They are not. The vast majority (last time I checked >80%) of the public shares the opinion that you should own the equipment you buy and that it should be repairable.
If you happen to be a person that tries to establish neo-feudalism at the cost of everybody else, a public figure successfully making that an issue, might be problematic for your goals, sure. But then your goals may just be beneath contempt anyways and you should working on becoming a productive member of society instead.
If you think it is a shtick because you haven't really looked into it that much and you have a contrarian reflex, maybe try to bring the receipts next time. You know, like:" Louis Rossmann is a drama queen because remember when he said X about Y? Remember when he said Y about Z? It turned out to be Q and Louis had to know it was Q" etc.
Rossmann turned his YouTube fame into political advocacy for a popular topic, that he politically represents. Don't like that topic? Don't watch his content. People change and so does the focus of their life.
I run an university electronics workshop and the issues he mentioned are the issues I have to deal with every week, be it some shitty vendor lock-in on some gear or equipment where just the part that dies first is proprietary and service-hostile.
My brother had a heavy knee injury during his youth. His doctor said he can forget doing sport. Last year he ran a mountainman (full marathon with a descent of 1200m).
He read more into the topic and figured that it is mostly a question of training. Since in my family many do sports, I have seen this many times: have an issue with some joint, back, whatever? Unless you broke a bone or have an open wound that typically means you need to find the right training to get over it.
My girlfriends first older brother was one of those babies, the second one survived but is disfigured and needs serious care to live. I had three such kids in my first class at school, four different ones in my second and a sizeable number of parents whose kids didn't survive childbirth. Not being allowed to eat certain mushrooms or digging in the woods was the easier part.
So this may be a bit more tangible for some people than for others.
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