The kind of company were Management and HR go around trying to convince employees they're like family and other similar things are simply trying to act like abusive cults.

Strictly speaking, as soon as an analog signal is quantized into digital samples there is loss, both in the amplitude domain (a value of infinite precision is turned into a value that must fit in a specific number of bits, hence of finited precision) and on the time domain (digitalization samples the analog input at specific time intervals, whilst the analog input itself is a continuous wave).

That said, whether that is noticeable if the sampling rate and bits per sample are high enough is a whole different thing.

Ultra high frequency sounds might be missing or mangled at a 44.7 kHz sampling rather (a pretty standard one and used in CDs) but that should only be noticeable to people who can hear sounds above 22.35kHz (who are rare since people usually only hear sounds up to around 20kHz, the oldest the person the worse it gets) and maybe a sharp ear can spot the error in sampling at 24 bit, even though its miniscule (1/2^24 of the sampling range assuming the sampling has a linear distribution of values) but its quite unlikely.

That said, some kinds of trickery and processing used to make "more sound" (in the sense of how most people perceive the sound quality rather than strictly measured in Phsysics terms) fit in fewer bits or fewer samples per second in a way that most people don't notice might be noticeable for some people.

Remember most of what we use now is anchored in work done way back when every byte counted, so a lot of the choices were dictated by things like "fit an LP as unencoded audio files - quite luterallyplain PCM, same as in Wav files - on the available data space of a CD" so it's not going to be ultra high quality fit for the people at the upper ends of human sound perception.

All this to say that FLAC encoded audio files do have losses versus analog, not because of the encoding itself but because Analog to Digital conversion is by its own nature a process were precision is lost even if done without any extra audio or data handling process that might distort the audio samples even further, plus generally the whole thing is done at sampling rates and data precision's fit for the average human rather than people at the upper end of the sound perception range.

The Guardian absolutely is capitalist (neoliberal, even). Just go check back on their campaign against Corbyn (a leftwinger who won the Labour Party leadership from the New Labpour neoliberals some years ago) which included such memorable pieces of slander like calling a Jewish Holocaust Survivor an anti-semite because of him in a conference about Palestine comparing some of the actions of the government of Israel with those of the Nazis, this done in order to slander Corbyn by association since he was in the same panel in that conference.

Also you can merely go back a few months to see how The Guardian supported Israel well into their Genocide (though they seem to have stop doing it quite as eagerly in the last few months).

Last but not least they very openly support in British elections the Liberal Democrats (who are neoliberals) and the New Labour faction of the Labour Party (also neoliberals) and very often have pro-privatisation articles on UK subjects and are never for bringing things back into public ownership even when privatisation has failed miserable to give better services or lower prices.

I lived in Britain for over a decade and read The Guardian for most of it, so maybe The Guardian's political slant is clearer for those familiar with British Politics.

I do agree on The Intercept and Democracy Now! though.

Can't really speak for the others with any knowledge.

In several countries the mainstream party politicians (who are Neoliberals) have been slowly privatising healthcare by forcing the Public Healthcare System to outsource more and more of the work to the Private Sector and using the same technique as Thatcher in the UK used to privatise railroads (of which now, decades later, you can see the horrible results) - defund the Public Service and when the quality falls because of it claim that the Public Sector is always incompetent and the the Private is always competent so that's why that Public Service had problems hence it needs to be privatised to improve.

On top of that there is the actual genuine problem (rather than artificial meddling with the Public Healthcare System to send more money into the hands of politician's mates) that populations are aging and older people require much more Healthcare Services in average.

I've lived in a couple of countries in Europe and some have Universal Healthcare systems (such as the UK and Portugal) but others such as The Netherlands and Germany have Mixed Systems with Health Insurance but highly regulated and were some people can get Health Insurance from the state.

You're not going to go bankrupt from the treatment or get treatment denied in countries with UHC.

However if you lose your job or never find a job in the first place due to illness related issues or disabilities you'll almost certainly end up on benefits which again can be better or worse depending in the country.

I would say things have been getting worse all over Europe (personally I think it's exactly because there's been too much copying of shit from the US), especially when it comes to the level of benefits for poor people being sufficient (the house prices bubbles all over the place and the lack of building of social housing have made this a massive problem in most countries), but that's not the same as simply going bankrupt from medical bills because you've had an accident, ended up in an emergency ward and got a life saving surgery.

So it's literally something that's not legally supposed to happen, unlike in the US.

Mate, as I've said it's not one but TWO countries I lived in with Universal Healthcare, and you can't be a Nationalist (as you're trying to imply) for TWO countries.

If you're comparing like to like - i.e. the average poor disabled person in both a country with Universal Healthcare and the US - you're going to get some cases of those having insufficient treatment in countries with UHC (especially in those were neoliberal governments have been defunding their UHC systems to try and privatise Healthcare even against popular will, like the UK), whilst the vast majority of those people will be fucked in the US (unless they're Veterans).

I've lived in several countries and it's just an enormous peace of mind living in a country were you know that if you're involved in an accident and end up getting costly treatement in an emergency ward, you're not going to be ruined.

I think you're seeing the problems relative to a specific baseline and you think that there are massive problems there (which I'm sure there are) but the thing with the US system is that the baseline itself is way worse and all those problem you see would also be problems there but much worse (or maybe not, as those people would die a lot faster, at which point no problem would be visible) and on top of that in the US there are way more people with even worse problems when it comes to Healthcare than the "poor disabled person" in a country with UHC.

For every case of a disabled persion on benefits having to wait 1.5 years for a non-urgent operation because they can't afford private healthcare, there are a million of cases of people who get a common problem like Diabetes or Cardio-Vascular problems and get treated for free (down to getting the medicine for free, which for a person below the poverty line will be true even for the worst countries) rather than suddenly being faced with an extra monthly bill for medicine (which would be a massive hit for those poor people you cosplay as caring about for the sake of argument) or a massive bill for urgent surgery.

(Which reminds me: one thing that will NEVER happen in one of those countries, unlike in the US, is when one ends up in the emergency ward and requires an expensive treatment to save their life, they won't get a massive bill at the end)

Oh, and even if you pay out of pocket for medicine, it's way cheaper in those countries than the US, as governments have used their leverage to limit what Pharmaceutial companies can charge, unlike in the US.

The healthcare risks for the average individual in countries with Universal Healthcare aren't even in the same universe as in the US.

There's also a difference between imperial miles and nautical miles, though I'm not sure if British long distance ships use nautical miles or not.

Whilst I would be wary of saying AirBnB is the main cause (more likely it's a big one but not the only one), keep in mind that when realestate prices go up in major cities, that pushes out people who go to cheaper places, pushing prices up in those places which in turn might push some out from those places and into even cheaper places.

So housing bubbles centered in main cities do naturally spread out from there to places were the original causes of the bubble are not present.

That's a whole different kind of "special".

Yeah, it does sound like they're opposite sayings.

I wasn't aware of the French saying, but was of the Spanish one, plus there's one which is exactly the same as the Spanish one in Portuguese.

That said, feeding "Plutôt qu’être seul mieux vaut être mal accompagne" to DDG gives pretty much only results with the saying "Mieux vaut être seul que mal accompagné", which is the same as in Spanish and Portuguese, so I'm thinking that the lyrics of the song are in fact purposefully reversing the well known saying "Mieux vaut être seul que mal accompagné" for impact.