On a related topic, many guitar amp manufacturers are now selling hybrid tube/solid state amplifiers. Most guitarists look down at those with thinly veiled contempt. Basically, such amps are said to be the worst of both worlds.

I have to disagree. There are two types of such hybrid amps and both kind are perfectly suited for particular purposes.

The first is a tube pre-amp/solid state power amp. These are perfect for general purpose blues, rock, pop, country, jazz, etc. People who play such music want the gentle and subtle clipping offered from real tube preamps. Such a hybrid amp would give players the natural sound they want, with a lot of volume, at a much lower cost than a pure tube amp.

The second is a solid state preamp/tube power amp hybrid. These are perfect for hard rock players and metal heads. Such players don’t care about the subtle clipping offered by over-driven tube preamps. They get their clipping from distortion pedals. But they do want the mmph which can only be delivered by a 100 watt tube powered head. A 100 watt tube driven amp/half stack/full stack is loud to the extent that it actually pushes air. (Maybe that’s why metal heads usually wear so much hair spray?)

Now I’ll admit, in a perfect world, someone who wants a tube sound would be better off with a pure tube amp. However, we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world where we’re occasionally forced to make compromises. And a tube/solid state guitar amp is not a bad compromise to make if your funds are low and you get the one that suits your needs.

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First, it must be pointed out that watts are watts. Tube wattage is not different from solid state wattage. It’s simply ohm’s law.

W = I2 x R

By any objective measure, 50 watts from a tube amp is identical to 50 watts from a solid state.

So why do tube amps sound louder?

It comes down to two things. How the wattage of amps are rated and how tube amps clip/distort differently from solid state amps.

An amplifier’s wattage rating is not a measurement of its maximum output. The wattage of an amplifier is rated at its highest output without clipping.*

Here’s a picture to show what clipping is:

As the wattage is increased, the amplifier reaches a threshold where the highest outputs are clipped off. This clipping causes distortion. In a PA system, it would suck. In a bass amp this would suck. But guitar players use this clipping to modify and add to their sound.

The next part of the puzzle is this: tube amps clip different than solid state amps.

Tube amps clip gradually as the wattage is increased while solid state amps remain clean until they’re suddenly very clipped/distorted.

The gradual clipping of a tube amp adds to the flavor of a guitar. A guitar player using a tube amp can play harder to get more clipping and play softer to play smoother. These subtle nuances add character to a player’s sound. The sudden massive clipping of a solid state simply sounds like shit. There are no subtle clipping nuances with a solid state amp, it’s either not clipped or fully clipped.

Based on the foregoing, manufacturers of solid state amps set their volume knobs to nearly 10 before the clipping starts. So to get a 50 watt solid state to full wattage, you have to turn it up nearly all the way.

Manufactures of tube amps know that guitar players want clipping, so they take that into consideration when they set their volume knobs. So a tube amp reaches its maximum wattage at a much lower volume setting. Probably 3/4 of the way up. Sure it’s clipping past that point, but it’s a warm and good sounding clipping.

So if you turn up a solid state and a tube amp to 10, the solid state is pushing its full 50 watts, and probably sounds like shit because that bad clipping would be starting (unless its a very high quality solid state amp such as a Fender or a Roland**). while the tube amp would be pushing more than 50 watts. The tube amp would be clipping, but it would be that good sounding clipping.

And of course a 50 watt tube amp set to 5 is putting out more watts than a 50 watt solid state amp set to 5.

I should point out that I’m not arguing that tube amps are “better” than solid state amps. I’ve owned plenty of solid state amps in my life and only a few tube amps. And furthermore, objectively speaking, solid state amps are cleaner and are less prone to clipping. However, subjectively people like the sound and warmth of tube amps more, despite their objective faults. Well, that’s not right. People like the sound and warmth of tube amps more because of those faults.

*This is how the wattage of quality amplifiers are rated. Measuring the maximum output including clipping is one way how low-quality amplifier manufacturer’s cheat. Another way they cheat is by measuring the peak and not the average (RMS) wattage. Thus you can find 2000 watt amplifiers for only 77 bucks on Amazon. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

** Speaking of high quality solid state amplifiers, back in the early 90s I used a Fender Princeton Chorus. It was only 50 watts, but it rocked. Actually, it was even less than 50 watts. It was actually two 25 watt amplifiers in stereo. So basically I was playing through two 25 watt amps each into its own 10″ speaker.

But it was loud. Not as loud as the singer’s tube Fender Twin (which I think was rated at 25 watts), but plenty loud enough. I never had any problems at any show we played.

Generally speaking, the vast majority of tube amps are of a high quality. There simply is not a market for low quality tube amps.

However, the vast majority of solid state amps sold are of a lower quality. A 25 watt Crate solid state from the 80s would never have been loud enough to play in a band. I know because I used an 80′s built 75 watt Crate 2×12 combo in the early 90s and it was not loud enough. (Luckily some one gave it to me for free.)

So if two guitar players are in a room, one with a tube amp and one with a solid state amp, statistically speaking, the tube amp is going to be of a much higher quality than the solid state. As I explained above, that’s going make the differences in volume much more apparent.

However, if the solid state was a Fender or a Roland, there would be no discussion of, “Why is your little amp so much louder than mine?”

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I find it hilarious that men are supposed to know that men and women view things differently, but women expect men to view things the exact same way they do.

Let’s imagine if this woman carries out her threat. You know what will happen? Nothing.

The wife will complain that if she doesn’t do the baking, there will be no Christmas cookies and crumpets. However, if her husband really wanted Christmas baked goods, he’d simply buy some.

I’m sure the wife will complain that the Christmas cards wouldn’t get sent out if her husband was in charge. And she’s absolutely right. But the thing is, we don’t give a fuck about cards. If we want to wish someone holiday cheer, we’ll wish them that cheer when we see them, in a phone call, or a text, or whatever. We see no need to send out a bunch of cards.

And speaking of cards, I’m sure the wife will complain that the thank you cards wouldn’t be mailed out. Once again, she’d be right. But also once again, the husband wouldn’t give a fuck. You know who came up with the byzantine rules of etiquette such as sending thank you cards? Those rules were created back in the 1800s by wealthy women who didn’t work and had servants, so they spent their free time making up stupid rules.

If a man wants to thank someone for giving him a gift, he’ll say, “Thanks.” If it was mailed to him, the next time he sees or texts him he’ll say, “Thanks.”

And of course the wife will complain that unless she does it, the Christmas decorations will never be put up or taken down. Once again, she’s probably right. But men don’t care about the vast majority of stuff the woman put up. Other than the tree, men want their house just like it is the rest of the year. And we only want a tree if there are young kids in the house.

And saving the best for last, the wife will complain that without her, the presents will not get bought. Note to women. You’ve turned gift giving into a spectator sport. The act of buying gifts and creating a presentation with the gift is more important than the giving. If men want to buy someone something, “Oh, dad would really like this,” we’ll just buy it for him. We might pay to get it wrapped, if it’s for a chick, otherwise we’ll just give it unwrapped. It’s about giving someone you love something they’ll love. Not about outdoing what everyone else is doing.

And sure the gift list will be a lot smaller with the husband in charge, but ladies, we simply have no desire to buy presents just because. Especially for people we never see or don’t give a fuck about.

In a nutshell, the real reason the wife spends so much time preparing for Christmas is because she wants to. She likes looking for “just the right Christmas card.” Spending time looking for “just the right family picture” to include the the card. Spending time baking “just the right cookies” for the holidays. Spending time shopping to get “just the right gift” for someone she has not actually seen in years.

She’s deluding herself by thinking she’s doing it for her husband’s benefit. She’s doing it for herself. And if she no longer enjoys doing it, stop. It’s really that simple.

Sure we sit around a lot in the winter and watch a lot of football or basketball. But there’s a good reason for it, that’s what we like to do. As I said, you guys like going to shop. We like staying in and watching TV.

Furthermore, it’s not like men sit on their asses all winter. We’re the ones who shoveled the driveway, started up the wife’s car to get it warm, and scraped all the car’s windows so the wife could get her car out of the driveway to do her Christmas shopping. Of course we do have an ulterior motive other than keeping her safe: Keeping her out of our hair while we watch sports.

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I feel bad for his experience, however, in and of itself free is not a business plan. To put it another way, free only works as a part of larger plan. Free works for Google. Free works for Facebook. Free works for radio. Free works for over-the-air TV broadcasts.

I’m trying not to criticize Tyler, but in a nutshell he was offering a crappier version of his paid service and hoping and praying that it was crappy enough that people wouldn’t use it and would pay for the higher quality version instead.

That’s a not a plan. That’s nonsense. If the free service is good enough, he is not offering any real reason to pay. If that was his plan, it was bound to fail.

Furthermore, if the free service is crappy enough that people would chose not to use it, why would anyone be willing to pay for it? Once again, if that was his plan, it too was bound to fail.

Think of it this way, if your first experience with Coke was a fantastic free cola, why would you ever buy the next one? Or if your first experience was a crappy free cola, you’d probably be hesitant to pay for the next one.

In reading his blog post on the topic, you can tell he is genuinely frustrated and angered by his experience. But considering his plan was a logical failure to begin with, isn’t being caught between a rock and a hard place the very definition of frustration?

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As he passed the first door, the double set of elevators, and the second door, he looked right at them as if he was looking for a particular place.

Since he looked confused, I asked him.

You seem lost, can I help you find something?

He replied, quite perturbed,

I’m just trying to find a way back to the first floor!

I replied back,

Well, you might want to try that door (pointing at the door) or the elevators (pointing at the elevators).

He stood silent and still confused. I continued,

This door right here has stairs that will take you downstairs or the elevators right there will take you downstairs.

Still perturbed he turned, opened the door, and walked down the stairs. I honestly expected him to walk up the stairs. Really, I did.

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Here’s the downside. Right to Work laws conflict with our rights to enter into contracts and have them enforced.

Imagine this. You’re a farmer and you enter into a contract to sell your crop to a buyer for a set price. That gives you piece of mind. You’ll sleep better knowing that when your crops come in, you have a predictable income.

However, when it comes time to sell, the buyer tells you, “I found a cheaper seller.” You tell him, “But we have a contract.” He tells you back, “Sure we do, but this is a Right to Buy state. That means I have the right to buy from whoever I want.”

Any union depends on the right to enter into contracts and having those contracts enforced. The workers get together and negotiate with the employer for wages, hours, working conditions, benefits, etc. The employer can agree, counter-offer, or disagree. However, once a contract is agreed to and signed, both sides have to honor it. The workers have to work and the employer has to pay.

What Right to Work laws do is eliminate any duty on the part of the employer to honor the contract. In a Right to Work state employers can still form unions and enter into contracts with employers, however, the employers can hire workers not bound by the contract.

So, much in the same way my hypothetical buyer can simply ignore the contract and buy from someone cheaper. Employers in Right to Work states can ignore the contract they freely entered into and pay non-union members whatever they want.

I recently wrote that the real purpose behind workers compensation laws is not to help workers, but is to give employers immunity from tort lawsuits. Similarly, the real purpose of Right to Work laws is not to help workers, but is to give employers immunity from the enforcement of contacts entered into with employees.

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On the website I ordered a student trumpet that was marked as “in stock,” but I immediately got an email saying it was back-ordered. I decided to call. I told the sales person that I needed it by Monday so I wanted to pay extra for next-day expedited shipping.

We went through the student trumpets they had in stock and the pickings were slim. I finally found one. It was nearly 600 bucks, much more than I wanted to spend, plus I paid an extra $56 for expedited shipping. But I needed it, so I bit the bullet and bought it.

I got an email confirming it would be delivered Monday. But checking my Guitar Center account showed that it was standard ground shipping. I called and was told that it was a error on the website, it was in fact expedited shipping.

Sure enough, come Monday morning I check UPS’ website and it’s marked as standard ground shipping. I won’t get it until Thursday.

I called up and no one could explain why my shipping was changed from next day expedited to standard ground. Of course they refunded my shipping. But that wasn’t really the point. I really wanted to know how I could specifically tell a salesperson that I needed it by Monday evening and that I needed to pay expedited next-day shipping and he could just ignore me.

Anyway, I ended up going to a pawnshop on my lunch hour and found a great Yamaha student trumpet for $150 bucks. When I finally got the trumpet from Guitar Center, I returned it for a full refund.

So I ended up getting a really good deal on a trumpet, thanks to Guitar Center’s inability to do what I paid them to do. Thanks!

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The premise is that a 13 year old, black, 4 and 1/2 foot tall, orphan living at an evil orphanage, finds a pair of basketball shoes that might have been previously owned by Michael Jordan. He makes a wish on the shoes, gets struck by lightening, and suddenly he’s the greatest basketball player ever.

Through a series of events that could only happen in a movie underwritten by the NBA (seriously), the kid is signed to a play for the NBA.

He gets paired up with another player to mentor him, and you immediately know the kid will teach the mentor the real meaning of life, and eventually, the mentor will adopt him.

Anyway, the amazing thing about the movie is that is portrays an alternative universe wherein racism and even racial differences do not exist. In other words, the fact that the boy and mentor are black simply never comes into play.

The only other raceless movie I can think of involving a black main character goes back to Richard Pryor’s Brewster’s Millions.

I’m not a member of a minority. So I cannot fully imagine what it would be like to grow up subjected to racism. However, I certainly understand that if you grew up with racism and eventually became a movie director, you’d want to explore the problems with racism. Accordingly, you’d make films about the problems of racism.

However, maybe for us to get past racism we need more films showing us what our world could be like without it.

BTW, the movie was a contrived, ham-fisted, and utterly predictable piece of crap. My 10 year old son loved it, though. Which is not surprising as he was certainly a member of the intended audience for it.

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When I was a kid I’d much rather have driven an actual ATV rather than a virtual one. However, back then video games consisted of indistinguishable blobs of pixels. And if an ATV game would have existed, it would have been a side scroller. It’s really hard to be immersed in a side scroller. Not to mention that it would have been played on a 27″ TV from across the room.

Have video games reached a point where they’re actually better than reality?

When I was a kid we’d play cops and robbers or war and run around pretending to shoot each other with toy guns. When we got older, we’d put on coats and sun glasses and do the same thing with BB guns.

I know kids still do similar things, because of the popularity of Nerf guns. But Nerf guns are not anywhere near as popular as Halo and or Call of Duty.

And what happens when virtual sex becomes mainstream? Will having pretend sex, where you can focus on any number of particular and obscene fetishes, be better than having real sex? Heck, maybe we’re already there. One common complaint I’ve been reading in advice columns are husbands who choose to masturbate to porn rather than have real sex with their wives.

And of course games such as the Sims and WOW are already replacing face to face friendships.

How long will it be until someone develops a virtual eating game which would lead to a situation where people would rather starve eating virtual food than eating real food?

On one hand, I’ll never be afraid of a time where people stop overeating or over-reproducing. Even if some people chose to do those exclusively in a virtual world, there will always be enough people to do it in the real world.

But I hope we never lose our sense of awe about the world. The beauty of a waterfall or a tree swaying in the wind. If we ever become more fond of a virtual world over our world, we’ll have even less incentive to make our real world a better place to live.

If we stop giving a fuck about trees, why would we ever protect forests? A society obsessed with a virtual world would clearly let the real world go down the drain.

This shouldn’t be too surprising as we’re already destroying the planet without an alternative virtual world in which to live.

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Back in 2007 Holly Averyt was a truck driver delivering goods and merchandise to a Wal-Mart store.

She slipped and fell on a grease spill and ruptured a disc in her spine. She was unable to work as a truck driver after that.

She and her attorney went to trial and was awarded $15 million dollars. The state’s supreme court reduced the amount to $10 million. Which is still pretty damn good.

So how did Averyt’s attorney win so much money from a slip and fall case? It’s not like she’s quadriplegic or anything. She can still walk, lift stuff, and get around. She just can’t work as a truck driver.

Well, sometimes the plaintiff’s attorney wins the case. And sometimes the defense attorney loses the case. While the plaintiff’s attorney certainly did a great job, the blame for the size of the award falls onto the defendant.

Wal-Mart’s entire defense was that there never was a grease spill. In Wal-Mart’s opening statement to the jury their attorney adamantly denied that a grease spill ever occurred. He stated to the jury that the evidence admitted at trial will confirm that a grease spill never occurred.

But Averyt’s attorney didn’t give up. He had an apparent epiphany where he realized that someone must have cleaned up the spill, so he decided to track down that entity. It turns out it was a local government department. He contacted them and they emailed back an official document explaining what they did to clean up the spill.

Wal-Mart’s manager took the stand and testified that there was no grease spill. Averyt’s attorney used the document to contradict his testimony. The shit hit the fan.

To make a long story short, suddenly Wal-Mart’s manager and attorney remembered that, yes there was a grease spill. And suddenly they found tons of documents concerning the clean-up.

Wal-Mart’s new argument was that, there was a grease spill, but “boy oh boy did we do a great job in cleaning it up.”

Needless to say, the jury saw through their attempt to outright lie to them.

What’s funny is that Wal-Mart tried to blame the whole thing on Averyt’s attorney for ambushing them during the trial. Exactly how was Wal-Mart ambushed? They knew damn well that the grease spill actually occurred. It’s not like they were surprised by the government document. It’s not like they couldn’t have prepared for the contingency that the truth would be revealed at trial.

As the supreme court pointed out, Wal-Mart decided on trial strategy that failed. That’s no one’s fault but their own.

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