He has a history that is highly suspect and it’s absolutely shocking he didn’t get blown up during the metoo era

When he had a practice he had a 19 year old patient. He allegedly molested this patient. He denies these claims. What is undeniably true is that he made this patient an intern at his practice

Because of his inappropriate hiring practices he was required by the licensing board to hire another psychologist to sit in on all of his sessions. This rendered his practice no longer financially viable

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/dr-phil-disciplinary-file-isnt-what-radar-online-makes-it-out-to-be/

This article pushes back against some of the more sensationalized reporting of the time this blew up but (imo) it’s somewhat of an issue to do so. The issue being that a licensing board generally requires a substantial burden of proof even now to substantiate claims like sexual molestation of clients, especially so in 1988 Texas. What I’m saying here is that to the licensing board the sexual molestation claim was likely a “he said, she said” moment, where dr Phil steadfastly denied any wrongdoing and there was no evidence other than the woman’s testimony. Given that the board was probably reticent to issue discipline on this matter out of fear that it would result in legal response from dr phil, and somewhat understandably so as the justice system’s burden of proof for sexual assault victims is often quite high. Essentially if they had say, suspended or even stripped his license over this he could have had this action easily reversed and even sued for damages

This is almost certainly why the licensing board took the action they did. They 100% believed that girl. The requirement to have your sessions monitored by another professional is extremely severe and fairly unprecedented. It is their way of saying “we absolutely do not trust you at all, we know you are a scumbag, but legally we do not have the authority to revoke your ability to practice”. Ethics boards will do things like this: now you, at your expense, have to pay another professional to make sure you don’t groom any more women. And if you try to do so we will have testimony that you did. But most likely you will recognize that we don’t want you around anymore and give up (which he did, for a bit. He even let his license lapse. He is not licensed, to be clear. He has not been in some time). When you do his show you sign a contract saying you are receiving “advice” from some guy and not psychotherapy from a psychologist. I bet they do not make this clear to guests because they probably aren’t big on informed consent.

He found a loophole. Doctor is not a protected title. “Psychologist”, “professional counselor”, “lawyer”, “surgeon”, etc are legally protected titles. If you practice under these titles without the associated licensure and credentials you can go to jail. But if you’ve earned your doctorate and say “I have years of experience” you can do whatever. If Oprah props you up to a national stage that’s fine too, even if your style of “therapy” is not really therapy at all but really just confrontation and bullying. Also they obviously leave out he had to close his practice in disgrace.

That said, he was accused of changing in front of the girl often. And she was quoted as saying:

“He’d be running his hand up and down the inside of my thigh all the way up to my panties. He’d put his hands between my legs. He’d reach in my blouse and touch my breasts. He pulled my breasts out of my bra and kissed them.”

So yeah, real piece of shit and not just like “oh he rubbed her shoulders and made her uncomfortable”, though even that would be fucked up and gross. He genuinely sexually assaulted this girl

This is like, day 1 ethics for a therapist. Dual relationships. Clients are clients are clients. You don’t hang out with them, you don’t go to their birthday parties, you don’t friend them on social media, you certainly don’t hire them for a fucking job in your practice. This is in part so you can try to remain impartial as a clinician but mostly to protect clients as there is an inherent power imbalance in this relationship that can easily be taken advantage of (as seen here, plus he was like 38 when all this happened to the 19 year old girl so that power dynamic too)

scumbag

atarashii gakko and ano

Yeah there are plenty of apps that can rip from tidal, apple music, etc. noteburner, deemix, deezloader, musify, notecable, and noteburner are all ones that I tried where they successfully ripped audio from streams to flac but spectrals showed the flac was transcoded from lossy source.

Granted this is basically inaudible and super nitpicky, like honestly show me the person who can truly hear the difference between a modern 320 mp3 and a 16bit flac in a double blind situation. But if you’re using these rippers to upload to a private tracker, especially a popular release, guarantee someone will check

That said streamrip can get deezer 16 bit, 24bit tidal mqa (which isn’t actually lossless), and 24/192 qobuz but you need a premium account and things break from time to time

https://github.com/nathom/streamrip

Apple music remains a very closely guarded secret although I recently saw this: https://github.com/zhaarey/apple-music-downloader . I have to create a burner and vm to play with this though bc it’s pretty sketch

only thing I would add to this thread is occasionally usenet can be handy if you’re looking for music that’s fairly mainstream. If you’re looking for some weird 7” that was self released with 50 copies that’s obviously not gonna work though

Most of the publicly available ones that rip streaming services to lossless fail spectral checks. They can rip high quality MP3s which they then transcode to flac but if you were to upload this somewhere like RED you’d get shit for it. Literally every one I’ve found has failed the spectral check thread on RED

This MAY not apply for Spotify as they don’t stream lossless to begin with

The people that can actually rip fully lossless files from deezer, apple music, qobuz, tidal, etc guard that info like crazy. The second the method gets public you better believe all those companies are patching it out. Plus it probably doesn’t hurt that being the one with the keys to the method gets you like infinite ratio

I had an sd card with a horribly compressed version of the first season of aqua teen hunger force on mine. People were so jealous, probably (they weren’t)

The headphone cable is excellent for sure and I will never ever buy another set of wireless headphones again.

I have one set of wireless earbuds (Sony XM3) for when bigger headphones are impractical and for the price the battery life is shit. After roughly 2ish years of moderate use the battery life is cut noticeably and after 3 they barely last 30 minutes. Thankfully changing the battery is fairly simple (go sony!) although the battery used is a weird proprietary cell that cannot be purchased through legitimate channels and is fairly expensive (boo sony). But whatever, $30 on batteries is better than tossing earbuds that cost $250-300 a few years ago.

That said I have moved on from phones with headphone jacks. I still have a few sets of proper ass headphones that are pretty nice. If I want to use them with my phone I don’t fuck with dongles, I have a Qudelix 5K DAC/AMP. This allows me to use my wired headphones with any Bluetooth thing really. The only thing that could improve it is a user replaceable battery, and they made that: the Qudelix T71 although I haven’t tried that. And frankly I’m pretty sure I can figure out swapping the battery on this whenever it croaks. I’ve sourced and changed a lot of batteries in my time.

It’s not as nice as my proper setup for listening to flac or vinyl but it’s pretty indistinguishable aurally for the most part when listening to flac on my phone (vs flac on my home server via my better dac/amp which again is pretty aurally indistinguishable unless you’re a buttsniffing audiophile type. And if you are I dare you to double blind test it)

Sick ringtones too

http://onj3.andrelouis.com/phonetones/unzipped/Palm/Treo-650/

My palm treo 650 was the most badass phone ever