I used to wire up inverters on industrial solar farms out west. We all got laid off when trump got elected and he nixed an Obama era federal funding of renewables. Glad to hear it’s comin back

I use a really ancient analog hi-pot tester at work, which is basically a high potential insulation stress test. The hi-pot formula under UL is operating voltage x 2.25 + 2000v. It will put up to 40kV through a circuit at milli or micro amps to see if there is any leakage in the conductors through open air. This goes for bare conductors like busbars as well as insulated ones like wire, measuring their terminations or cracks in the insulation. It tests phase to phase and phase to ground to see if the electricity will jump thru air or over an insulated material, which is where the words strike and creep come from which have their own formulas of what is acceptable and what isn’t for manufacturing and installation. There’s a little more room for creep obviously.

All that is to say, there’s plenty of fancy new digital hi-pot testers. We rented one for a project that was going on a marine grade system. They’ll run a test at whatever your parameters you type in and save it all to a flash drive. We worked for 8 hours to set up all of our testing jumpers and ran a test for 1 second on the control wiring for it to say PASS then we put it all back together.

The fancy one saves the leakage current values to the drive. Our analog one will only display it on an analog dial and we write it down. This is ok for testing AC (and this is where things start to get a little over my head), something about the RMS nature of AC causes more leakage current during the test, so generally we have a leakage value of let’s say 1 milliamp. DC will generally only make microamps of current when we run the test. Try recording any kind of value when you look at the dial and it looks like it doesn’t even move past zero haha.

We basically told the customer that we have a pass/fail tester and can’t accurately produce any type of value for leakage on DC unless we rented or purchased another machine. But for 9 out of 10 times, it’s fine that’s all anyone cares about anyway. I’ve fucked up and left a plate somewhere it shouldn’t have been and believe me you’ll know when this thing fails lol. It sent 11kV thru a tiny circuit board, whoops

You realize there is incredibly varied, deep, impossibly different and complex music being made all over the world at all times right? In my small-ish city I can see a different show every single night, made up of mostly local and touring artists in small DIY venues that are 100 people or less. And just to show you I’m not bullshitting: https://arcane.city/

The advent of the internet has exploded creativity in so many different ways. Bands starting out can connect with other artists and fans in a DIY sense and play local gigs or tour without any kind of funding or record deals from corporate interests or private equity. Hell, I’ve gone to “clubs” that were like an old auto body shop ran by my friends, absolutely way past capacity in the hood, to see my partner open for acts from Kenya or at a tiny bar that had a really sick grindcore band from Brazil. It’s hard to say things like that happened regularly back in the day but who knows

And it’s not like people still don’t get big. I saw Alex G play in like backyards and tiny venues 12 years ago and now he plays one of the biggest venues in my city when they tour.

The view that music is washed up now just because the radio plays the same songs is pretty narrow. There was plenty of crap same-y boring music on the radio back then too. There’s a reason why all the rockers you’re talking about hated disco lol.

The creative types are always going to keep seeking out this type of thing and flourish. You could say the same about underground hip hop and rap, the club scene, punk, hardcore, jazz, EDM, folk, etc etc.