Avoid News, Part 2: What the Stock Market Taught Me about News
bayesianinvestor.com
bayesianinvestor.com
I have never researched a topic deeply and found that the media had been covering that topic accurately, ever. The harsh truth is that generally speaking the news is almost completely useless. You might as well just never watch it.
I think the very final nail in the coffin was the leaked recordings of the CNN technical director basically admitting what everyone pretty much already knew. That they spread misinformation deliberately, only give interviews to subject experts who they know will say what CNN prefers them to say and ultimately design everything they put on the screen to get hooks inside your limbic system and keep your eyes glued. The main tool they use to do this is the emotion of fear, and it was for this reason and no other that they created a COVID death counter. And every single one of those points is explicitly, literally and plainly stated on video by a very senior employee of CNN for all to see. so I’m afraid that I can’t be brushed aside as a Russian bot. It’s right there on YouTube.
And what about all the other media companies? This CNN leak, which is maybe the very embodiment of a scoop, was not on the front page of any major newspaper or news website. It was not elaborated on. It was basically not reported.
So yes, if the news is fake, imagine history.
Historians are extremely aware of the difficulty of determining what is true, and they certainly have no problem engaging with the messiness of it all.
I’m sure real actual historians in universities have these sort of discussions, but history class as it’s used in schooling is pure propaganda.
I'm fairly certain I was taught about conflicting evidence and, even more importantly, differing interpretation of events in school, for example we discussed the role of the US and the Soviet Union in the cold war quite extensively and controversially.
Sure, I am aware that actual high quality historical scholarship must exist, but I honestly wouldn't know where to find it without waking into a university and asking someone close to the field for research help. Nearly every book of history on the shelf of my local library is in the vein of Guns, Germs, and Steel. I enjoy listening to some history podcasts, but have mainly experienced them as good storytelling and nothing about how the sausage is made.
But yeah, 5th through 10th grade history, there was no nuance, just "this is what happened, this is History, this is the textbook, this will be on the test, the end." A handful of excellent grade 9-12 teachers would have you do primary source research[1], and there you might get some conflicting sources, but you just discarded the sources that didn't work with your thesis topic. (See how this works? Thesis first, then sources...)
It was only once I was in college that we really got into some of the nuance of multiple sources and working from the ground up instead of the top down.
[1] Specific examples that I recall: did an astronaut biography in 5th grade, I interviewed my grandparents on 1930s Depression-era life in 9th grade; I did a primary sources (newspaper on microfilm) paper in my college sophomore year (14th grade) on the The Rainhill Locomotive Trials of 1829 in London, England.
Maybe that's because of the stories you select for checking. Did you ever deeply research something non-sensational? Like a feature about new-years celebrations in Nepal?
It’s like when they report that some pandas got offspring in captivity in zoo X.
Even if they lied about it, even if they invent a new country where there are celebrations, it makes no difference.
It is useful to consume and fact check news on what could have an effect on your life.
It also brings about the bias you are talking about.
Because the newly born panda might matter to the local veterinarian.
Well my train of thought certainly took a 180 degree turn there..
Not everything is part of some giant capitalist conspiracy. Sometimes people just like pandas.
There's a difference between "oh look, there's a baby panda, this is an easy one" and participating in a months-long coordinated campaign designed to make money.
When I was in my late teens and eagerly devouring the Whole Earth Catalog and its successor Coevolution Quarterly for their reviews and pointers to new tools and ideas, it was easy to trust what I saw written there. Until one issue when they had a long survey of backpacking equipment, which even at 17 was something I knew quite a lot about. It was ridiculous, so bad (*)
Most people who write for a living don't know as much about the things they write about as people who do those things as the central part of their lives.
But it's worse than that: even when the author is a bona fide expert in the subject, there's still plenty of room for disagreement within the field.
The dream of reading "authoritative" accounts of more or less anything is a dream. Instead of being mad that journalists and other writers don't live up to your dream, accept this situation as it is, and understand that deepening your understanding of anything will require significant effort on your part. That doesn't mean that there are not better and worse sources of information, and understanding how to identify this is important. But there's nobody who is going to write "the true story" because there is no true story, just a complicated mess that you can put more or less effort into understanding.
(*) granted, some of what made it so bad was the clash between my UK-based understanding of gear and conditions, and their western US equivalent.
The media is a counter power but a power nonetheless. Just like you cant trust the president to judge a criminal, you shouldn't trust the media to judge the president. Just let everyone speak, make your soup yourself and split responsibilities: the executive lead the police and military, the judiciary protects criminals as much as society , the media warns of big and small events and they each compete and drag the carpet to themselves.
This is healthy. The alternative is hanging liars and people with difficult truths rather than letting them both speak. Or: detecting lies from truth is only possible by opposing several (and not just two or the border is skewed towards the most sensational) views.
CNN will say there a radioactive event south of China, China will say there s absolutely nothing wrong, the minority owner of the plant will say it s worrying but the problems lies in China moving the red line regulation, experienced people will say this probably warrant waiting, panicked people will say it must shut down now, ecologists will say any nuclear plant is too risky for the cost, and the truth is somewhere in the merging of all these but you can only have a gradually improving view of the event as pawns position themselves over time.
Is it? Is it not the main power? What politician could rise whose profile wasn’t vetted by the media? Can any politician decide something different than what is broadcasted by the media, for example if all media say we should lock down for Covid, despite population disapproval, can any politician resist?
Media is probably the power, and the 3 other heads (executive, legislative, judiciary) are basically following, at our current point, in 2021. At least, if they want to stay relevant.
Corollary: The definition of democracy should include the 4 powers. Media should be free, and due to Loi Avia in France, and due to the state of emergency, media is not currently free to say what it deems correct.
It is true that there was a breach in the fabric, which allowed someone billionaire to become president (albeit with little control over other key institutions), and that was probably because they hadn’t harnessed control over internet when it took off, circa 2012-2016, but that gaping hole is now closed: Someone reasonable is back as the head of state, media now agree with the president, social networks put a cap on network effect for viral news, people can be arrested in UK and Canada for mistweeting, and the accusations of rape/pedophilia will do the rest for the remaining figureheads - In France for the last 3 elections, accusations/investigations on tax evasion hit 4 figureheads (excluding the DSK story, not talking about Assange accused of rape intermittently). Everything is back on track, “Oops, you saw through the matrix, move on”.
I used to subscribe to The Economist. I then realized, after they kept getting a lot of things wrong over the years, that in my humble opinion, a lot of their headlines should be read prepending the phrase "We would like you to believe that..."
A lot of "movements" these days are completely astroturfed. There's a few foundations that sponsor thousands of institutions all with the same mission statement to make things look like they're a grassroots movement, but nobody really wanted any of it. That's what disconnecting from the media gets you. All that astroturfing flooding in from everywhere stops infecting one's understanding of the world with useless B.S. I've given up almost all mainstream media for podcasts because they can be produced for nothing and spend a long-time looking deeply into issues. They cost nothing to produce and host, so it's really hard to cancel them as well. It's not like video. Hosting audio costs very little.
Listening to random podcasts I find from guest appearances on other people's podcasts and on and on almost feels like eavesdropping on real people talking instead of the same simple message broadcast over and over again via every notable news outlet.[1]
Not like I am a big fan of the CCP, but give the devil its due from time to time, or at least figure out how the magic tricks work.
Then, there's a very important tool in forming editorial slant - omitting reporting on inconvenient facts. Italy and Spain, the putatively sluggish laggards strangled by overly strict labor protection laws, have somehow overtaken the allegedly dynamic UK in labor productivity. Ireland, the purported economic wonder, have a household disposable income (a fairly good metric of material standards of living), lower than Italy and much lower than France. We keep hearing about the importance of education, competitiveness, R&D and ease of doing business, yet somehow Finland, which tops the rankings, is in year 14 of it's economic stagnation. Have you heard any of this from The Economist?
It is behind all those on a per capita basis, but that's the mean, not the median. I infer that this means Ireland has less income inequality.
(Ireland's economic wonder was growth from the 90s through to the early 2000s, largely via foreign direct investment, incentivized by low corporate tax rates. This structurally inflates GDP and makes the country look artificially good on international comparisons, but this is fairly well known, I believe. Irish economic commentary often uses GNI instead, and in fact the Irish central bank replaced GDP with GNI for its own measurements of the economy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_gross_national_income.)
https://shootingthemessenger.blog/2020/08/10/the-economist-d...
The author of that blog also got a byline in articles in Buzzfeed News [1] and The Guardian [2] about the same thing happening at the Daily Telegraph.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/deansterlingjones/coron...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/apr/14/daily-telegrap...
The Govt of India has basically stated that Economist peddled baseless allegations and if look deeper you will see it is wrong and in deliberate bad faith.
https://www.opindia.com/2021/06/goi-rebuts-economist-report-...
quit indulging in ad hominem arguments.
From the OpIndia article:
- "A few weeks back, controversial left-wing US media outlet New York Times had come up with imaginary numbers..." (hyperbole, ad-hominem)
- "The low death rate in the country has become a major concern for the western press, who are trying hard to depict India in a bad light." (Are they? Why? Is the "western press" working in concert on this project?)
- "However, the entire analysis done in the article was based on ‘estimates’ based on randomly selected numbers" (So the allegation is that the researcher and/or the Economist selected numbers randomly to represent the Covid death toll in India?)
- "[...] it seems like the Indian government has finally decided to take on the misinformation warfare being propagated by a certain section of western media" (Does this seem like an unbiased presentation of facts?)
The implication, as far as I can tell, is that "western media" is seeking to embarrass the current leaders of Indian government out of pure spite. However, to my eyes, a more believable story is that the government of India is embarrassed by the high Covid death tolls and would like to adjust the numbers downward.
From a story in NPR:
> FRAYER: There is another reason why India's coronavirus numbers may be skewed - hubris. In early March, India's health minister declared the pandemic over, but cases were actually creeping up, and some politicians didn't want to ruin the narrative. Dr. A. Velumani runs a nationwide chain of medical labs. He told local media his labs have come under pressure from local politicians to manipulate coronavirus tests and report fewer positive results. [^1]
We saw this very same narrative play out here in the United States under the Trump administration, and just like in the OpIndia story, when confronted with evidence they had mishandled the response to the pandemic, the government responded, "Fake news! They're out to get me!"
The New York Times article mentioned in the OpIndia piece [^2] also seems to be in good faith, explaining how they arrived at their estimates in great detail.
To summarize: when I put on my critical-thinking cap, what I see is the Economist, the New York Times, and NPR presenting good-faith, easy-to-believe arguments that the death toll in India is higher than reported by the Indian government, and OpIndia presenting the difficult-to-believe argument that it isn't, but that western media wants to depict the government of India in a bad light for unknown reasons.
[^1]: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/29/992122467/indias-real-death-t...
[^2]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/25/world/asia/in...
claim was it is true and nothing fake there, so you did a strawman there. Since that is true, it shows economist as acting in bad faith in best case scenario.
Opindia is reporting on Govt of India rebutting the Economists argument. These are not opindia arguments, they are paraphrasing GoI's. So the below part you quoted is a paraphrase of GoI
> "However, the entire analysis done in the article was based on ‘estimates’ based on randomly selected numbers"
See actual press release here
https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1726521 and the twitter post here https://twitter.com/drharshvardhan/status/140367805453529088...
I am reproducing part that shows Economist acted at the least in bad faith and you have continued on same basis by claiming that you checked out their research and back it over the actual data given out by experts in field of health and agency that collates the actual data
***
The unsound analysis of the said article is based on extrapolation of data without any epidemiological evidence.
Studies which are used by the magazine as an estimate of excess mortality are not validated tools for determining mortality rate of any country or region.
The so called “evidence” cited by the magazine is a study supposedly done by Christopher Laffler of Virginia Commonwealth University. An internet search of research studies in scientific database such Pubmed, Research Gate, etc., did not locate this study and the detailed methodology of this study has not been provided by the magazine.
Another evidence given is the study done in Telengana based on insurance claims. Again, there is no peer reviewed scientific data available on suchstudy.
Two other studies relied upon are those done by Psephology groups namely “Prashnam” and “C-Voter” who are well versed in conducting, predicting and analysing poll results. They were never ever associated with public health research. Even in their own area of work of psephology, their methodologies for predicting poll results have been wide off the mark many times.
By their own submission, the magazine states that ‘such estimates have been extrapolated from patchy and often unreliable local government data, from company records and from analyses of such things as obituaries’.
Union Government has been transparent in its approach to COVID data management. As early as May 2020, to avoid inconsistency in number of deaths being reported, Indian Council of Medical Research has issued ‘Guidance for appropriate recording of COVID-19 related deaths in India’ for correct recording of all deaths as per ICD-10 codes recommended by WHO for mortality coding. States and UTs have been urged through formal communications, multiple video conferences and through deployment of Central teams for correct recording of deaths in accordance with laid down guidelines.
***
> In early March, India's health minister declared the pandemic over,
NPR has not given any source for this claim and if you look at the Minister's twitter timeline for the period , it shows the opposite.
https://twitter.com/drharshvardhan
Or check out the timeline of the ministry he heads
https://twitter.com/MoHFW_INDIA
All proof there shows that he & ministry was calling for people to be careful, warning about increasing cases, updating on vaccines & health protocols. Not the actions of someone who declared it is over.
So that is a explicit lie/untruth from NPR and your comments also show that you find it easier to believe that India is hiding deaths at unimaginable rates than India has done exceedingly well given its challenges.
Other publications which carried out the same news
https://www.indiatoday.in/coronavirus-outbreak/story/extrapo...
https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/national/reports-o...
https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/india-news-unsoun...
> An internet search of research studies in scientific database such Pubmed, Research Gate, etc., did not locate this study and the detailed methodology of this study has not been provided by the magazine.
It's here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352170008_Prelimina...
>> There's a lot of indicators of bad faith in the OpIndia article, but I don't see any in the Economist article.
> claim was it is true and nothing fake there, so you did a strawman there
...sorry, the claim is that what is true? I'm not following you on that one. For me to have "done a strawman" means I would have asserted you were making an argument that you weren't making. As I understand it, you said the Economist was making claims in "deliberate bad faith", and presented an article to rebut the Economist's claims. It appeared to me that was exactly backward. I don't see how that qualifies as anything close to a strawman.
>> In early March, India's health minister declared the pandemic over,
> NPR has not given any source for this claim and if you look at the Minister's twitter timeline for the period, it shows the opposite.
I think they're talking about this: https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/india-news-india-...
...which I admit isn't the same as "declaring it over" but which could arguably be considered wrong. Which is fine; I'm wrong all the time, as is every other human. Acknowledging when you're wrong is one of the requirements of arguing in good faith. Wrongness doesn't imply incompetence, but failure to admit and correct mistakes does.
Anyway, I have zero interest in "making India look bad", and I wish the people of India well, as I'm sure you do. Here is all I am saying:
* I don't see "deliberate bad faith" in the Economist article, and I see an above-and-beyond effort by the New York Times to explain their methodology
* I have seen with my own eyes members of the government of the United States play down the impact of pandemic out of short-sighted self interest, and so it is easy for me to believe another government would do that
* The arguments made in the official press release linked above strike me as overly defensive and don't offer anything more than "no, that's not true" with no additional evidence provided
* And once again, I wish the people of India well, and I hope the government of India acts in the best interest of its citizens with competence, pragmatism, honesty, and efficiency.
In any case, best of luck to you! I hope we can both think critically about the information we consume.
** True, the official death toll has fallen steadily for the past month, to half its peak of over 4,000 a day in mid-May. But evidence continues to accumulate that the government’s numbers represent a disturbingly small fraction of the real figure. This discrepancy does not just mean that the true level of India’s suffering has been glossed over. It has made the crisis worse, for instance by causing authorities to underestimate demand for oxygen and drugs.
News organisations including The Economist, as well as independent epidemiologists, have speculated that India has suffered perhaps five-to-seven times more “excess deaths” than the official number of covid-19 fatalities, currently just over 355,000. ***
The GoI press release has said that the methodology used by Christopher Leffler is not used anywhere else to estimate deaths.
You disagree and back it. Can you point out where this is accepted practice.
Using occam's razor. If cases & Deaths as 5-7 times, then this would be easily detectable, especially as the second wave dies down as per official figures.
So at peak the cases were 350,000 per day officially, as per economist it is over 2 million. This week the cases are 65k, so then it must be 380k cases as per economist. Same for deaths, officially 500 deaths and should be 3000 deaths as per economist.
Where are all these invisible cases & deaths?
If as per economist there were all these 5-7 times extra cases/deaths, the need for O2 would be far greater. There has been no crisi on that side for weeks now. Only for a 2 week period did capital Delhi have shortage due to the mismanagement of the state govt there that was pulled up by the courts.
So you are willing to consider opinion polling and patchy insurance claims( in a country that has minimal insurance coverage) that compared India with US figures over official figures that are collated by heath authorities.
It is far more believable that US media that has persistently painted India in negative light wants to continue the practice even when there are reasons to state facts as is and risk India being shown in a positive light.
I have already give you one data point where NPR pushed a untruth that you conceded. That was not even bad faith, direct fakery.
Is this how one thinks critically?
I have no problem if you want to believe fake news but lets drop the charade that you have no option other than trusting Economist or that they have a good track record. Information is easy to get in this day and age.
It is your laziness that lets such media spread fake news by appealing to your biases.
Who did see it coming? Are there any media outlets that reliability predicted financial crises?
Mike Sherlock for one. He’s gotten dumb but he was on point on this.
The majority of podcasts I've listened to have an obvious political bias, even the ones I would deem mostly objective clearly show some of the hosts biases. I've actually stopped listening to some because of this. ('Reply All' and 'Rich Dad Radio Show', for example, at opposite ends of the spectrum.)
If you know of a podcast that purely, subjectively presents news, I'd love to hear it!
Podcasts are by no means "The Truth", but at least they are not on the mainstream narrative script and they often don't have a purely political focus. As long as they aren't solely discussing the mainstream news narrative or reacting to it, they can be very interesting. I think Bret Weinstein can be pretty interesting as far as media criticism goes. The Other Life podcast[1] is an example of a podcast that's very disconnected from the mainstream narratives and feels like I'm sitting in a cafe in the 90s drinking coffee with a bunch of intellectual weirdos. Maybe not your cup of tea, or coffee, but it's better than listening to the mainstream news and filling myself with that garbage.
Not the Sandy Hook stuff? Surely that's got to be at least in the running.
Look at global warming: Either it is man-made or not, either it is a problem for our future or not. There's no objective middle ground. Sure, one could simply have news that say "there is a drougth in the center of the US, stronger than other droughts in the last 50 years", without any context. But even this is not objective, because omitting the context of global warming already skews the message.
Or let's use a real historical example: The Soviet Union's invasion into Poland in 1939. Without any context, the SU is clearly the agressor. But with the context of Polands invasion into the SU in 1919 things suddenly look different. And with the additional context of Russia annecting polish territory in the 18th century it looks different again and so on and so on. There clearly is no way to communicate this objectively (i.e. in this case, pro-Russia people could ask why I'd stop here and not with some polish-lithuanian action before the 18th century).
Why? You can’t explain all the things (even if you’re backed with true data) in one article – that would take a library. A drought by itself doesn’t skew anything, but maybe your intent is more that just that.
The Soviet Union's invasion into Poland in 1939
This is a circular problem. Either do not call it “invasion” or do and so be it. The fact that some monkey punched some other in year 40000 BC has nothing to do with active political contracts. I will not even downvote you on the internet if I find out that our gggps shot at each other in ww1/2, it’s irrelevant now. Most of these people are dead. If you want to remain neutral (nearest to “objective”, which isn’t a thing in case of a physical land), call it a conflict based on historical events and let a reader investigate, discuss and decide who is right and who is wrong, if any, if they ever want that decision. Maybe most people don’t really give a genuine fuck about who is right (if that was a bet, I’d go all in with it).
I would even read political news then. Modern “good boys bad boys” or “oh see you see what you done” stories only make me laugh or facepalm. I’m a reader, not a puppet. No surprise younger people only want tiktok and clothes.
For that, we not only have to know the what, but also the why behind a news item. We have to know the relationships between things.
So while we can't indeed can't explain everything completely, that doesn't mean we can't explain anything.
In hindsight the drought/global warming example is bad because there can indeed be another reason for the ocurrence, but even telling multiple possible reasons (e.g. by asking an expert) makes the news item more insightful than any context at all.
> This is a circular problem.
Yes, that was my point! There is no arbitrary threshold where we could stop referring to things happening in the past and get unbiased news.
Or yet another example: The current debate around minimum wage increases. The news could simply state the positions of the two parties, and the current nominal number of $7.25. But that wouldn't make this unbiased, because the $7.25 at inception had a different purchasing power than now. And a different ratio to GPD per capita. Thus omitting this context skews the news item towards the side that is against an increase. But adding the context favors the side that is for the increase.
I see it as a source of events that then can be discussed with actual people around you to create a world view. This way an information either misses you completely or you relate to a trusted group that has it. In a world where news are complete, there is nothing to discuss, because authoritative (or not, it’s hard to check) sources already said everything. This swithces discussion from learning all the details to taking the presented details. This is a problem known as “what’s not being said”, and personally I see it everywhere now. I.e. if we disagreed on an interpretation, it was you versus me (both at least knowing each other). With context-ed news it’s your sources versus my sources, which we both are unable to really check adequately, because it’s a recursive problem. That induces beliefs instead of thinking. I believe that context should be left vague at least. If there are questions, press should formulate them, not answer.
The press is never unbiased - look at newspapers from the 50s or 60s which had strong anti-communist propaganda. Everything has a slant - I don't understand where the obsession with "unbiasedness" came from.
The only question that matters (in a democracy or anywhere with a free press) is - does the media hold people in positions of power (whether political-power, wealth-power or celebrity-power) accountable for their misdeeds or not. Bias is only a problem when it interferes [directly] with this purpose.
> Look at global warming: Either it is man-made or not, either it is a problem for our future or not. There's no objective middle ground. Sure, one could simply have news that say "there is a drougth in the center of the US, stronger than other droughts in the last 50 years", without any context. But even this is not objective, because omitting the context of global warming already skews the message.
There is an objectivity here: scientific consensus, aka naked provable facts. And climate change is proven to be man-made, and it is proven that if humanity does nothing to curb CO2 emissions it will spiral out of control.
Objectivity in news as a result means to not give those who go against scientific consensus any platform.
That said, push any ideology far enough and they all start to disagree with objective reality. That doesn’t mean accurate information is somehow slanted or facts are somehow political because objective reality doesn’t care, it just is. If every day you list the ~9,250 Americans that died yesterday you’re going to cover mostly natural causes but also plenty of hot button issues for both sides of the isle.
Ideally, the goal would be to minimize bias, however I see the opposite many times, and I see it actually as a result of reduced revenue for people that make news.
We, the public at large, responded to information that evokes emotion (especially outrage). We rewarded it with clicks, translating into money for the people that collect and curate it for us. And that is what we get now. We get information, that has been compressed, and while factual many times, it is without the necessary context to come to an appropriate conclusion.
I think the antidote to this might be consumers rewarding publishers and journalists that wait before publishing. They wait so that there is time for the relevant facts to be gathered, there is time for the editors and journalists to write and edit properly. And, to still keep in mind, that it is still insanely difficult to provide all of the context needed about a situation to have an inexperienced person come to a proper conclusion. As one should know if they have ever read an article about a field they are intimately familiar with and have spent thousands of hours in.
Facts relating to events aren’t news their just facts.
> The distillation of facts down to what is and is not relevant itself will introduce some level of bias.
You can come up with the threshold for what’s news long before individual stories show up. It’s filtering based on political context that’s the problem not simply filtering. Aka, decide ahead of time that a president being impeached is news that’s fine. However, if your coverage depends on their party affiliation that’s a problem.
> provide all of the context needed about a situation to have an inexperienced person come to a proper conclusion.
I don’t see why people need to be making conclusions from the news. A Twitter account tweeting any earthquake over 7.0 is fine on it’s own.
Personally I would prefer reporters to stick with known accurate information rather than what whoever they spoke with believed to be accurate context. Shootouts between drug dealers could be over territory, or just about anything else. Unless they spoke with the people actually involved it’s all supposition.
It seems like the lack of context gets used to skew peoples perception of an issue just as often as false information, for example classifying gang violence and robberies as "mass shootings" without giving any other details. This can be applied to just about any topic out there. It's easier to leave out details and use esoteric language, than it is to lie about what happened. People can at-least deduce bias/flaws given enough narrative, and a track record of inaccurate context damages an organization's reputation.
Most shootings that look like ‘gang in gang’ are probably ‘gang on gang’ violence. But, that doesn’t mean a specific shooting was actually ‘gang on gang’ violence. Gang members also shoot people for personal reasons unrelated to being a gang member. And they also get shot for reasons unrelated to being a gang member. If the assumption is it’s always ‘gang in gang’ and it’s always reported as such then that’s a lot of biased and often incorrect information being reported as fact.
It’s not uncommon for gang members to just go out and randomly shoot stuff the same way young rednecks shoot at road signs. The difference is gang members in cites are vastly more likely to randomly hit someone due to population density.
There aren't many (any, really) quality guarantees on non-podcast media anyway. It isn't like they get any negative feedback when they lie or make mistakes. Viewers can't even withdraw support for specific known liars on a channel. It is unclear why a podcast would be at a structural disadvantage to any other media source, and probably higher reputational stakes.
i started tuning in less, but i still do.
My assumption is that with the increasing polarization, many shows followed their audiences to the poles. It feels rare these days for someone to not stake out a stance on some culture war battle, whether subtly or not.
It's honestly weird that Joe Rogan feel like one of the least biased popular programs to listen to out there, or the least biased in a consistent direction at least. You also get a lot of off the wall crazy shit on there, but honestly someone willing to have enough of an open mind to have people on like that not just to make fun of is a nice change of pace, even if the things are ridiculous, given how entrenched everyone else is in their positions.
There are plenty of other hosts that do a much better job than Rogan (David French & Yascha Mounk). Rogan does indeed have a slant, it just doesn't fit into the most stereotypical red v blue one.
So while "Pod Save America" for example is biased, I still believe their takes on what is happening at the federal level are informative and thought-provoking.
And I pity those who don't take the time to create their own philosophical defense of their beliefs, and only parrot what Fox News tells them to think.
When I start getting into a heated discussion, I like to turn away from arguing about specific people (too much) and say "What do you want this country to be? What matters to you?" and the discussion becomes a lot more enlightening.
So yeah, if someone really believes that the poor deserve to die because said person, making $60k a year, thinks that taxing the ultra-wealthy is unethical, I'm gonna have some problems with your character.
For someone who extols “philosophical defenses of beliefs”, you certainly make use of shitty straw men to do so. I suppose you didn’t say anything about the quality of the philosophy.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2021/04/05/more-th...
And the politicians in red states are conspicuously making efforts to restrict voters, in ways that they know are more likely to apply to voters who oppose them, going well beyond just voter ID:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_efforts_to_restrict...
So no, it's not just the OP's internalized bias. It's a simple, objective fact that they are attempting to make it harder for their opponents to win elections, based on an objectively false narrative.
I will bend over backwards to try to reach a common point from which to move forward and share a country together. I want to be aware of my own biases and the places where I disagree with the people who share some of my views. But that simply cannot happen in an environment like this, and nothing I do can change that.
It's what they are saying, in public. The large number of them saying so doesn't make it less true, only much scarier. It would seem impossible that so much of the country should be so objectively deluded, but it's literally their own words.
https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_ID_in_California
For a non-citizen to vote in CA, they either need to lie about their identity or lie about their citizenship. They are not "allowed to vote".
Here's the crux: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/873878423/voting-and-election...
Higher ID requirements increase security, but also improve republican result b/c democratic voters are less likely to have certain IDs (I think). As a result this can be spun either way as Republicans restricting voters, or Democrats opposing countermeasures to fraud.
Personally I don't know, I think I'd focus on Democrat behaviour; Given they just got off the back of Russia-gate, and accusing a foreign superpower of interfering in the election, they should also theoretically have a stake in voter fraud. I'd expect them to be focusing more on driving their demographics to acquire ID, rather than loosening requirements. Mail-in voting is a hard one though.
As an aside - I'm unconvinced by reports that voter fraud are low. No evidence of fraud isn't evidence of no fraud, and too many news articles or "explainers" seem to focus on lack of evidence versus a secure and airtight verification process.
consider https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/nonc... :
election officials .. referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting.. In other words, improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001 percent of the 2016 votes in those jurisdictions.
Forty of the jurisdictions .. reported no known incidents of noncitizen voting..
In the ten counties with the largest populations of noncitizens in 2016, only one reported any instances of noncitizen voting..
In .. the states where Trump claimed the problem of noncitizen voting was especially acute — no official we spoke with identified an incident of noncitizen voting in 2016
Because "no evidence" isn't relevant. If it was, no one would care about Trumps taxes; and the IRS would happily decrease reporting requirements, and work on an honour system.
The mechanism by which the ruling powers of the nation are decided is pretty important, so the requirement on "time, money, and political capital" is not at un unreasonable - it isn't important if "we treated every problem like this.." because every problem is not equally as important.
The fact is there are huge incentives to cheat, and undeveloped nations across the world are characterised by unfair elections, it's not unreasonable, then, to place importance on the veracity of the election process, more than just a glib "there's no evidence that this is a serious problem".
> I care more about the process being abstractly and theoretically perfect than the people these rule changes would actually effect
fairness is dictated by the rules you dismiss as "abstract and theoretical". You talks about "facts" and what "we know", but that is the very issue - what we don't know. It's convenient to discount the value of what we don't know when the current worldview favours your opinion. I don't know anything about undetected fraud, and neither do you; neither of us know how much a problem this is, or who/how it affects people. The only solution is an airtight process, and you seem to dismiss that, worse still, attempting to characterise me as unsympathetic for placing value on such a thing.
The US is the richest country in the world, and it's government richer than most nations of the world. Why should it lack the resources to secure the most significant process in the nation, while poorer corporations (mastercard, veritas etc), and even the military can secure their own, lesser processes much better.
Yes, I dismiss your desire for an airtight process, because I think it's security theater, whose actual outcomes would be massive and largely detrimental relative to the actual desired outcomes.
Signing ballots with 4096-bit RSA? If you think that wouldn't prevent fraud, I disagree - dismiss without basis iyw.
(Ignoring RSA tangent, making all concert-goers go through an X-Ray to screen for weapons and drugs would catch more weapons and drugs than the current pat down/bag check process does. It would undeniably increase the security of the venue, while slowing down entry, exposing concertgoers to X-Rays, and IMO providing more annoyance than actual extra security)
It seems that you think, for voting, that's a fine trade-off. I do not.
edit: not disagreeing that signed tickets would prevent fraud. Disagreeing that it would be worth, say, an additional $5 fee on the tickets, plus slower more expensive readers to verify that they're signed correctly, plus plus plus etc etc. My entire argument here is based on the net utility of additional security measures, not whether or not those measures provide additional security.
The only thing you referred to that was process related (versus physical security) was use of encryption keys. Why not talk about the pros/cons of that?
> It seems that you think, for voting, that's a fine trade-off
With respect to x-ray screens? Not at all, nor did I say such a thing. Nor do I think all things that could be described as "security" are exactly equivalent to each other, such that you can mention x-ray scans, and the argument automatically extends to RSA keys.
I just don't see how an average person concerned with being deported is willing to risk exposing themselves by registering with the state government, especially in the last 8 years of ICE really pushing the limits on what they can do.
You say "no evidence of $x != evidence of (not x)" which is true in theory, but let's step into reality: "No evidence, despite systems built to detect evidence".
You act as if people aren't already on the lookout for fraud, or that systems are not already resistant to them.
I was talking about vote fraud, but that's not necessarily an individual act.
> despite systems built to detect evidence
Which systems? Where are they described?
Even if voter fraud were a problem (it isn't), they're not even pretending that these measures have anything to do with it. And that makes it incredibly clear that they don't believe that voter fraud is the reason for any of it.
The left presents the issue as:
- People already verify themselves
- Voter fraud doesn't happen
- This is used to disenfranchise voters by making it harder because poor people are less likely to have a valid ID.
The right presents this as:
- No proof is required in many jurisdictions
- There are instances of voter fraud, and while few, there may be a lot we don't see
- Voting is important, so we should take it seriously and require people prove their identity to vote
The problem is that both of these sides are entirely true. Namely, verify != proof, and people talk past each other on this, and selective omission of the other side's valid points lets people believe the other side is irrational or wants it in bad faith (Republican operatives may want to make it harder for certain groups of people to vote, but from what I've seen Republican citizens do not).
The respective parties have no interest in bringing people to consensus on this issue because right now it's one that activates the bases of the respective parties. It's a way to take moderates that might be tempted to vote against the party line or for the other side for select positions and people that they respect and radicalize them by papering over the real positions of those people with the twisted narrative put forth by the media that caters to that side.
People are for the most part rational and compassionate and don't want to hurt each other. But people are also easily misled into believing things because of curated information presented when they don't have counterexamples that they trust or first hand experience to the contrary, and those beliefs cause what is considered rational and compassionate to differ from person to person. We shouldn't hate or dislike the people on the other side, they are just like us. We should engage them usefully, and the first step of engaging usefully is accepting that we're like them also in that we're presented with curated facts, so we should be open to their points when we engage and accept them in good faith.
Some will claim it, or say it's a myth, and if anyone points out those few cases, they'll say it's statistically insignificant to the point of not being something we should worry about.
It is strictly incorrect, but colloquially accepted as okay to say, which is yet another thing argued about from each side.
I suspect that you thinking you haven't seen it is likely because you're interpreting their intent and not reading the words strictly, or they followed up to clarify and that's the part you remember, because it's common to see. The problem is that the other side remembers the first claim or the strict interpretation of the statement, so both come away thinking they were correct, one in that the statement was "true", the other that the person was not being "truthful".
It's quotes like this that make it hard for non-Americans like myself to take American political discourse seriously. To me, takes like this are at a similar effort level to the "Obama is a socialist!" cries heard in the 2008 election. Yawn.
https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=breaking%20all%20norms%2...
So, are you a bot? Or are you just not thinking independently? I strongly suggest spending less time on social media. You’ll find that both sides of the political spectrum are just people, like you and me. Not “monsters” as the news would like you to believe.
I think plenty on my own. Like many humans, I occasionally use terms in vogue to get the point across. You must not work in technology or communications. (see how asinine that sounds?)
I'll forgive you for not seeing my other comment in the thread, but to be clear, my beef is with the political establishment on the right. My feelings toward "normal human beings" who are conservative are much more varied.
The Republican party as an organization at the federal level is indisputably a less patriotic, more malicious organization than the Democratic party, which has its own problems of infighting, horse-trading, and "everyday" corruption.
But instead of posting the latest trove of articles describing McConnell threatening SCOTUS appointments again, or Trump trying to use the Justice Department to investigate debunked claims of voter fraud for his own benefit, or the million other datapoints about how awful the GOP leadership is - please, continue calling me a bot.
I suggest checking out right-wing Twitter/corporate news to see how they're using the same words ("unpatriotic", "malicious") in the exact same way to describe the democrats. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between. It's not black and white, evil vs. good. At least not in the real world.
Just because they say it too doesn't make the correct side less correct.
I also see a lot of genuine local grassroots stuff that makes my blood boil (NIMBYism), so I don’t really attach a moral credit to those qualities.
There is still value to be gotten out of the magazine but if you're looking for accuracy or truth that can be relied on then I think that ship sailed a long time ago. "Thankfully" the internet has allowed everybody to finally realise that.
I will happily listen to other recommendations.
Can't go wrong with PBS either. I love a Frontline deep dive
Could you link this out please?
“There’s no such thing as unbiased news” — high level CNN employee
Or to put another way, just because nobody is 100% a saint all the time, doesn't make being an asshole ok.
From MediaBiasFactCheck: > Project Veritas was created by James Edward O’Keefe III, an American conservative political activist. He produces secretly recorded undercover audio and video encounters, some selectively edited to imply its subjects said things they did not, with figures and workers in academic, governmental, and social service organizations, purporting to show abusive or allegedly illegal behavior by employees and/or representatives of those organizations. Project Veritas primarily targets liberals and liberal organizations.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/project-veritas/
Meanwhile the person interviewed was a technical director, as I understand it meaning an audiovisual equipment guy, so I don't know why you'd consider him an authority on editorial decisions. That all media has some bias doesn't seem so shocking, but rather mere common sense.
The video had long segments without cuts, that seemed to include enough context. Do you have any examples from that video in mind as to how it could have been misleading despite this?
> Meanwhile the person interviewed was a technical director, as I understand it meaning an audiovisual equipment guy, so I don't know why you'd consider him an authority on editorial decisions.
If I recall correctly, he only spoke of his first-hand experiences. So even if he were just a janitor, that would not cast doubt on his claims.
FYI this is canon in media science, and probably something every journalist learns at university.
This criterion would only apply to the presentation of the information within a story, not the choice of stories or even the choice of information sources, since there could be too much to choose from. There, traditional honest unavoidable bias would still exist. But without this blatant dishonesty that commonly occurs, people wouldn't be quite so misled.
Of course there is no such thing as objective news, but that's because reality isn't that simple either. CNN and most mainstream news are indeed trash (more like entertainment), but there is very good news out there. You have to find the right news source for the right topic.
For American foreign policy, read The Intercept; for American domestic issues - Propublica, for middle eastern news - Al Jazeera English, and so on and so forth.
News is never "objective facts" and neither should it be. Good journalists put news in the context of reality.
It certainly was an issue in the past https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/05/wikileaks-cabl...
Now Al Jazeera Arabic though, that is one steaming hot pile of bullshit, that is still so popular in the Arab World that they call it the "people's news". Saudis and Emiratis alike used to watch it, likely because of their strongly biased reporting against their respective governments, as well as their pro-Muslim position on all matters. And interestingly, they were mostly allowed to broadcast in those countries up until recently.
AJE does a lot of reporting on the daily lives of people in the middle east, and for that its a very welcome source for me. Also if you know Qatar's particular political stance you can sort of de-slant a lot of reporting. Criticism of the west, especially of western militaries are something you literally cannot hear within US news.
"region known for its religious conflicts" - I would sort of state that you're not being very objective there yourself. Islam is a religion but its also a really ingrained part of the culture in ways that christianity is not. It just means they're reflective of the culture thats produced it.
Would it be better if i said ethno-religious conflicts? Regardless, one of the biggest conflicts in the middle east is probably Israel-Palestine, and its been that way for a long time. I'm not sure i would look to AJE for neutral coverage of that (I definitely wouldn't look towards western media either though)
At the very least its nice to put human faces and see real communities in what is often a more rhetorical exercise.
> Would it be better if i said ethno-religious conflicts
Perhaps, I would just say a reading of the situation shows its less a religious conflict and more a political apartheid state. The borders and political rights are the true conflict here, with the religious element sometimes there to inflame and balkanize the factions. Having been raised in the US to think that its this mighty crusade-like undertaking of the jewish/christian world vs the heathen muslims, a real examination of the factors causing protest, violence and conflict has a lot more to do with secular power structures - thats why I think its pretty safe to say its much more akin to South African apartheid the likes of which we haven't seen in a long time. It also helps that the solution must be political.
I'm not saying that sort of thing isn't valuable or important, just that showing the suffering of one side in a conflict is not neutral reporting.
And to be clear, not everything should be neutral reporting. Understanding the struggles that the Palestinian people face is very valuable. Its just a different sort of thing than a neutral report on the situation in the area.
Re characterization of the conflict:
I'm not sure i agree with your characterization, although i do agree that most of the time religion is an excuse for secular geopolitical ends. Regardless i'm not sure it matters for the main point of this argument.
I’m not trying to claim its neutral, but that it is a perspective you don’t often get, and is helpful for building empathy for the people living there as humans rather than pieces on a chess board of geopolitics.
I don’t call my characterization the unfallable truth, just for me it’s a lot closer to reality than what a lot of lenses I’ve had to view the conflict in the past :)
Because of their ownership I do tend to take a more critical view of their Middle East coverage. Need to view it (and everything really) through the "What does Qatar want?" lens. Although sometimes even that helps give a good "both sides" style comparison. For coverage on Israeli/Palestinian tensions I can use both that and the more standard US options and get a more well rounded view.
Their reality, or the one of their editor. As it as always been.
It just looks more obvious now, with all cross sources we can get.
Much of the world is a part of the USs economic imperialism, and hence isn't as far from the mothership as you'd imagine. All sources have biases. At least TI does fully independent reporting.
They also don't mix news and entertainment - the portion of the org that does TI is a non-profit.
Founders' influence often lingers long after the founders themselves. You think Greenwald didn't hire/collaborate with others who shared a similar world view?
One test I came up with recently is that if a source doesn't run stories that I disagree with, if they only have stories which I nod along to and agree with, then that source is horribly biased. It isn't that they're "right", that they only run "right" stories, it's that they're horribly biased.
If you're finding that context setting is consistent in its narrative, that's not a reason to recoil.
As an example, put yourself in a highly contentious context of a historical situation - say the apartheid in South Africa. If you found a newspaper that always took a position counter to the white south African government, you would have found a good newspaper.
That doesn't always work, but neither does a simple test like you've deviced.
1 - Project Veritas has a history of misleading / baiting subjects into saying things that sound bad, and of taking pieces of conversation out of context.
2 - A "technical director" in television isn't an editorial role, nor is it very high ranking. The job of a technical director is to physically operate things like the video switcher to choose which camera is on screen or to put up a lower third; their job typically would not be to decide who to interview, what to ask in an interview, direct the on screen talent, etc.
I am sure CNN, like most workplaces, has employees with varied opinions and political views. Seeing any one of those employees statements as evidence of the overall views of the company is kind of ridiculous.
During the 2016 presidential race they promised to drop a big discovery about the Hillary campaign's corruption, and it literally turned out that it was something to do with canvassers dressed as ducks who got into some kind of minor altercation. It was the cringiest non-story of all time.
*: I know this is a trigger word and I don't use it exactly in the sense of AJ or reptiloids. But it has its merit as a concise term refering to invisible power structures in the government.
That said, this is not a new development. Mainstream media today are doing this in subtler ways because they are forced to transparency by the rise of the Internet. As long as media organization need to turn a profit, this will always be the case. By having a rich media landscape, with different point of views, we were always able to keep a general balance despite the singular imbalances. The radicalization of opinions and the outrage economy, along with the Internet, have disrupted that general balance, with mostly right-wing leaning medias seizing that unethical advantage, and liberal left-leaning media trying to decry it, while having a hard time swiping their own conflicts of interest under the rug.
Surprisingly enough, this is mostly true for generalist media, though. I’m lucky enough to be a tech journalist, and despite having to deal with a lot of companies and a lot of products that they want to ultimately sell, I feel that our conflicts of interest are way easier to navigate, and easier to address.
Picking your news from carefully selected sector-specific publications, and putting together your own media diet, is the equivalent of eating organic and cooking your own meals vs eating out at McDonald’s every night. The equivalence, sadly, is true also for the level of education and income (and time) you need to have to do that, though.
An example that comes to mind is the various investigative interviews being conducted in the UK about the covid response last year. The news media focuses on gossip rather than the structural issues, institutional biases and lessons. Though even covid itself is probably not the most important issue today, it'll probably be something obscure like the reverse Flynn effect in Europe.
For awhile last year I felt like I needed the news to keep my family safe. After a while stewing in the fear factory, I realized that that the reporting didn't bare much relation to the actual scientific studies it claimed to be based on when I bothered to actually go and read them. I unplugged and only check niche interest news now.
I was becoming a worse citizen and person for reading the news, not a better one.
This applies to a lot more than just media, including important to mundane issues inside of an organization. Path of least resistance (aka bullshit) and all that.
I think when the stories and angles are so detached from reality, it is fair to wonder what is going on. You can call it conspiracy, or companies working together in a co-ordinated way for their best interests, fascism (with corporations and governments working in tandem), etc but its hard to dispute that there is an agenda to prevent the general population from receiving information that would allow them to make straightforward judgements.
What does bother me is quality, effort even. The majority of high visibility reporting is mostly commentary. Factual accuracy isn't even applicable.
They don't do the work. I very rarely encounter articles that feel like a journalist has poured over documents, spent hours with experts, etc. A good example is the latest G7 meet. Every summary of the underlying tax problems I read was substandard. The speculation about what G7 decisions would mean was substandard.
No one actually understood what they were writing about. They dig just far enough to strike emotional or partisan content: "Apple paid just %X tax, because tax havens, cheating & stuff." Tax is all about details. You have t
The average engaged reader who has read dozens of articles on the topic has not learned anything, besides good guys, bad guys and moral outrages. I don't think the journalists do either. If you want to actually know something about the topic, you need to go to wikipedia or hunt down a good blog article.
Indeed. Many times when I look at the original sources for news articles, the sources either include major pieces of information omitted from the article, or even information that contradicts the article. There's talk about how people on Hacker News/Reddit/Twitter/etc. comment without reading an article, but it looks like most reporting is the same - writing an article without looking at the source.
When you see that neither the reporters nor the consumers of the news seem to care about this, it's clear that the purpose is to entertain and not inform.
Depth isn't all that compelling. A well researched article doesn't get more views. The incentives to do a quick write up are strong. Spend 100 hrs researching a topic, for no gain... or spend 1hr writing an article with just enough content to draw agreement or disagreement.
No, the reality is different. Lots of news is just repeating what others report (news agencies to online news to news papers) because there aren't that many original sources anyway.
I believe what you think is (malicious?) agenda, is really just news outlets trying to survive. Murdoch/Springer/FoxNews to the contrary, but these are easy to avoid.
In addition, no news outlet seemed to be in enough of a survival mode to report on the Hunter Biden story for example.
I always thought of this as exact the problem. There isn’t time for a journalist to do their research (and the bar is low enough), so instead of reporting the truth, you get what they already thought and already wanted to say, sprinkled with a tiny bit of new info.
Maybe agenda is the wrong word, but it’s close.
In most countries that have these institutions, these media outlets are consistently rated, by both sides of the local spectrums, as being the most balanced.
Note, that this is _not_ the same as saying that they cannot be biased, since at the end of the day every decision is the result of some bias or another, but their mandate is to serve the greater public, and so they don't try to carve out and to chase a specific demographic.
Also, The Juice Media appear to be satirists, not journalists. While this and other satirical sources like the Daily Show may seem more truthful than mainstream news because they provide an emotional catharsis, they can actually be far more distorted than the mainstream media in terms of fact. Because while satire can express the truth, being honest isn't its purpose, so much as being funny.
The Juice Media are satirical journalists, but as far as I can tell all the satire is contained to the presentation, not the facts. The Daily Show is not independent, so putting them in the same bag as The Juice Media doesn't seem fair.
You say this like it’s a bad thing. That’s exactly what everyone needs to be doing.
Right now, it's simply a news story that is very difficult to confirm.
In any case, my recommendation would be to apply "I can’t help but see some kind of special interest or agenda whenever I hear a news story now." here, too. Everything else would be a bit inconsistent.
For anyone who may not be aware of the contents of the actual recordings, here are some quotes.
Trump was — his hand was shaking, he was losing it. He’s unfit. We were creating a story there. I think that’s propaganda.
[Trump's] hand was shaking or whatever, I think. We brought in so many medical people to tell a story that was all speculation -- that he was neurologically damaged, and he was losing it. He's unfit to - you know, whatever.
We had nothing else to run with at that time. We were like, just taking shots off a bow, just hoping something would hit, you know?
We were creating a story there that we didn't know anything about. That's what - I think that's propaganda
Look what we did, we got Trump out. I am 100 percent going to say it, and I 100 percent believe that if it wasn't for CNN, I don't know that Trump would have got voted out.
Like our focus was to get Trump out of office, right? Without saying it, that's what it was, right? So, our next thing is going to be climate change awareness.But let's agree that CNN's agenda was obviously anti-Trump because it was a major driver of their traffic... here's what really made me skeptical:
> our next thing is going to be climate change awareness
This line is really telling. The CNN tech director, ostensibly caught in an unguarded moment, draws a line directly from Trump's fake news/voter fraud claim all the way to climate science. This is really, really fishy.
It is a _moral imperative_ for humanity to live in greater harmony with the planet, which includes reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. This is not politics, it's an informed take based on science that aligns with an understanding of physics, a long record of paleoclimatological data, and things I can literally see with my eyes (I enjoy mountain climbing and have seen glacial retreat firsthand over years).
I don't believe it's a coincidence that Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the News Corp outlets, has enormous fossil fuel holdings and would be negatively affected by this inconvenient moral imperative.
I hadn't heard of Project Veritas, the originators of this claim, but a little research into their past history also makes me want to take their presentation with more than a little skepticism.
Again, I don't have any _direct_ evidence to claim that the quote is fabricated. I do believe that there are significant ulterior motives here in the reporting of this claim, and the claims are reported by outlets that themselves have a spotty record of journalistic integrity.
Instead of reading endless articles about a recording to determine if the recording exists, why not watch the recording itself?
Something I always wondered, why journalists, news and journalism is always about the "story", the narrative, the emotion ? That would take away a lot of scope for manipulation, harder to misinterpret and easier to spot the culprits.
Till few years ago, it was brought to my attention, they, like all surviving orgs, adapt and simply give what "the people" want.
I don’t know if it’s selfish but I just don’t have the energy anymore to care about what bad thing person X or company Y did this week.
My current philosophy is to treat news/Reddit/social media like email in the old days.
That is: log on to a desktop computer once a week and read the highlights. It is not accessible except through the desktop computer.
The funny thing is this approach is completely opposite the “stories” trend in social media. It makes you really aware of the FOMO-by-design pattern these days.
It's not connected to any outrage cycle, and has consistently interesting and thoughtful angles.
(Getting it in my inbox also lessens temptation to keep browsing eg Bloomberg or the wider net afterwards.)
I suppose it's just the editorial style driven by a different marketing strategy than daily newspapers.
Outrage is 'entertainment' in the broadest sense. Bloomberg newsletters are read by people who have goals besides entertainment.
When you are trading, you suddenly do care about accurate information, instead of just pandering to your existing biases.
(Newsletters like Money Stuff is still entertaining enough. It's just not the only goal.)
Compare also https://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/11/05/bryan-caplan/myth-ra...
I just can’t handle all the front page content that elicits outrage and/or incredulity, and the comment threads can be just as outrageous as the content itself.
Still, I dig so many of the communities on there, so I browse by setting aside time and hopping on my desktop.
I don’t use my desktop much (maybe a couple times a week), so I find it creates a nice mental partition from my day-to-day life and let’s me engage with Reddit on my own terms. Frankly, Reddit is a blast in small doses, so I’m happy with the balance I’ve struck.
The politics subreddit is an absolute abomination of one sided debate and everything else is shut down.
World news is basically America bad everywhere else good (but especially Canada and Scandinavia).
Trump was hitler.
Some small subreddits are useful but it’s exceptionally hard not to be sucked in to the rest of it, by design.
The times I occasionally get pulled into the void are when following a user's content/comment that I found interesting, then finding all kinds of bile that they push to the main forums.
Reddit also has an underappreciated feature of being able to sort posts database style (e.g. Top Posts > All Time) to get a sense of what a particular community found transcendent or controversial. If the top posts are any kind of angry response to a current event that's one you can typically ignore.
Show me to the promised land
As such, yeah, checking in once a week seems fine to me on most topics.
It's not willful ignorance, I have just acknowleded that I have limited time and resources and I should put those back into my local community. Being angry at stories on the internet helps no one.
I check in periodically, like once a month, to make sure I can still talk to people about stuff and am not too far out of the loop. But the daily scoop is not necessary.
A number of high profile people were held accountable for their tax evasion. Multiple people were prosecuted, and many politicians, including heads of state were forced to resign.
But because the Panama Papers did not contain US citizens (Panama is not a useful refuge for US tax evaders because Panama cooperates with the IRS), the reporting of such consequences was not politically useful, and thus not reported.
In fact, it was more useful to propagate the lie that there were NO consequences to the leak - something you are perpetuating here.
Please re-consider perpetuating this lie.
Yes, and it's not surprising.
The solution to everything in society now is "let the individual provide the solution":
* Democracy = "if a politician is shit then just vote them out, you really should do your research before voting"
* Capitalism = "if they're using slave labour then just vote with your wallet til they go bankrupt - if you simply buy an object with decent specs without looking into the company's track record on labour rights, then you're complicit"
* Broken system = "call your local politician to demand reform, the problem is ultimately caused by your inaction"
* Bad news source = "spend your spare time doing research before believing random stuff on the internet then"
Society has no cap on its complexity, nor boundaries for individual responsibility in a utilitarian world. This ultimately means that the stability and moral rightness is directly limited by how much effort You The Individual are willing/able to apply at any given time.
Is it really that surprising that when people have a choice between being Atlas or living a good life, they'll choose the latter?
More to the point, this is precisely why companies specifically push for "individualism" and "freedom" from regulation - because they know people don't have time or energy to police every single organisation under the sun.
EDIT: apparently HN doesn't support markdown lists. It does have a feature for stripping single newlines (like what you'd use to format a list), though.
That being said, I've seen friends and family become radicalized from social media. I think there is a nuance that people miss, radicalized doesn't just mean storming the capital or antifa, it also means jumping down someone's throat when they don't want to engage in your favorite content. This isn't just about politics, there are the conspiracy people, the UFO people, the spirituality people, etc. It really just seems like everyone is so energized towards making you the other if you're not in their subgroup.
The really dark thing about this is that I find myself not caring about things that are pretty important because it's filled with extreme people yelling at each other. I actually deleted a recent example that I was going to put in this post because I don't want anyone to pick up a pitchfork.
If the thesis of this piece is that newswriters sometimes get things wrong, or sometimes write sensationalized things, all i can say is, no duh.
- If I read Enron's financials instead of the news, I'd have gotten rich.
- If I ignored Hertz's financials AND ignored the news, I'd have gotten rich.
Author focuses on cases where the media hype ended up being wrong, but what about all the cases where the media was right?
> “America will end as we know it. I’m sorry to say so, unless we take this option,” he told CNBC on March 18, five days before ending his bet against the market. “We need to shut it down now. ... This is the only answer.”
He then made $2B a week later. I would assume most guests on that network are there to make statements to try and sway the market in some way to their favor. You just don't know if they are long or short on whatever they are talking about so without those disclosures.
If you think more online based news is better like Motley Fool. They are also registered as a Hedge Fund with the SEC [1]. I can't see/find what their specific holdings are on the SEC site but isn't that a conflict of interest to publish "news" or investment information and manage over $100M?
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/25/bill-ackman-exits-market-hed...
Given the size of the industry, its not like he talked it into oblivion. He might have been able to do that with a single company, but we didn't stop flying because he said so, we did it because of covid...
It's not dishonest to talk down a stock you are shorting provided you are open about your interest, but a news outfit concealing such a fact definitely crosses the line for me.
Fully agreed. I think having a more focused channel to consume news is much more effective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYc6QmaGnYc
For the reference.
At least news sources have editorial processes, reputations, trained, experienced, professional journalists. They aren't perfect, but they're much better than random bloggers.
They aren't saying news is unreliable, they are saying they can make more money on Substack.
How many times in the last few years have their "independently confirmed" anonymous sources been proven false?
I don't know - not a lot, IMHO, at least not in the publications I read. I'd say 99% are accurate.
But why is this blogger likely to be any better?
And even then, yeah I kinda trust random bloggers more at this point. Why? Because 90% of the "news" is just blogspam anyway, where one news org will write something "original" (frequently just an editorialized summary of a primary source you as the reader could consume directly) and tweet about it, at which point all the other journos will see it on twitter and write their own "coverage" of the story, which is usually just creatively re-wording the original story without doing much digging themselves as if they're still in high school copying each other's assignments with just enough changes so they don't get flagged by Turnitin.
It's the opposite: Journalism presents claims based on corroboration, presents all (corroborated) sides of the story, and tells you what the sources are, with the idea that you can decide for yourself.
> 90% of the "news" is just blogspam ...
An ironic comment ?
They wrote back saying they are not obligated to present all sides of a story.
ABC parades itself as unbiased to boot and is funded by taxpayers.
I can't find the announcement, but https://about.abc.net.au/2017/11/whats-wrong-with-being-fair... is the ABCs take from 2017, and https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/l... an example of criticism from 2019 that the ABC was still "both-siding".
If you think everyone agrees, I encourage you to listen a bit more and broaden your experience. I know and encounter many who agree with me (and many who don't).
I wish I was a journalist, but it's not my skillset.
But sure, let's get more substantive: if you can find a single news article from a mainstream news website that has the things you've claimed they have then I will concede the point. A reminder of your claim:
> Journalism presents... all (corroborated) sides of the story
A single example. I will wait.
We can see now in the world that these aren't trivial issues, not sport and not isolated in effect to a fictional online universe; they have real, very serious impact on the real world. To me, this rhetoric is also boorish and a waste of my time. I am moving on to something worth my time. I hope it goes better next time.
Edit: I want to preserve this part, in case the parent is edited. Maybe you don't understand evidence and reason and argument? Sincerely, that would explain it and I'd be happy to help out.
> I guess I'll point out that my comments are more highly upvoted than yours
Again, I tried to make this more substantive by giving you space to provide a single example of modern journalism living up to the lofty ideals you claim they already live up to, and you either would not or could not do so.
And then there is your little edit at the end. If you'll allow me some recap of my own:
> you use an appeal to the people, "many people agree with me", as if people agreeing with you has any bearing on whether or not you are correct about journalism.
> when this fallacious reasoning is turned around on you, you accuse me of not understanding evidence/reason/argument.
> you feel the need to "preserve" my reversal, therefore enshrining your own hypocrisy.
Is that about right? Rest assured, I will not edit my previous comment, as it contains the full context where I point out your appeal to the people and counter with my own, unlike your excerpt which seems selectively extracted to make it look like I was just bragging about upvotes.
I generally avoid all newspapers. The Economist does seem better.
I really would like to have a tool that can automatically put labels on news headers: clickbait, drama, speculation, she-said-he-said, or rumor. It's pretty easy to detect such headlines when reading, so training an ML model shouldn't be a problem. Removing tagged articles automatically would've made my news feed so much better.
They see themselves as the chosen few who's job it is to do this and who's job it is to make the general public think and believe the things that are best for them and the believe it's a privilege to be in the position that they are to be in charge of doing that and are proud that is what they do.
Any traders in the audience care to shed some light on how they would go about this?
I guess one could see whether some standard price moves seem "interrupted" by intermittent selling? So e.g., the price in a previously established channel doesn't hit the upper resistance as much as the lower resistance?
Any other takes?
Also see candlestick charts.
https://www.investopedia.com/trading/candlestick-charting-wh...
Sounds like a Monday-morning quarterback to me. I am guessing he lost money as the maret crashed due to covid unless he was in cash. if he truly had a sure-fire system of filtering out bad narratives, he would have gotten out before the crash in jan-feb as the virus was getting media attention, and then bought near the bottom. He would have known beforehand that Covid was different from SARS or Bird Flu and sold, anticipating a crash.
And once that genie is out, there's no going back.
I'd guess that media has known for ever that outrage is a potent driver of engagement. Technology today enables outrage delivery to be highly sculpted and surgically delivered. In my opinion this is a major driver of the increasing polarization of America.
The depth of our natural predilection to focus on threats has been discovered by neural networks and their systems optimized for profit, not truth and relevance.
The link on the previous post is broken: http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Par...
This would allow common people with a few thousand dollars to act on news and make meaningful amounts of money, while hedgehog funds have to wait for their transaction to painfully slowly go through.
Let real people make money for once.
If you own 100000 shares of AMZN, it should take an entire quarter for your trade to go through. You will lose money if there is bad news.
If you own 1 share of AMZN, it should take 1 ms. If you are a super well-networked intern and figured out the bad news, bravo, you just made a bunch of money.
And would need a way to backwards-track trades to make sure a single entity isn't placing millions of small trades...which would also require individual verifiable identities being linked to each trade.
That way you get a bigger pie to share around.
In any case, your suggestion wouldn't really work: the insider who would benefit would mostly be high up managers, not anymore 'real people' than the (relative) corporate outsiders who run the hedge funds and vulture funds etc.
Second, who would the retail traders trade with on those news? Market makers would go on to quote huge spreads, or not trade at all. Those institutional investors you want to hobble ain't so stupid. (And those that are, wouldn't last long.)
If you have better access to information, because of a leak, you are better fit, better networked, and should be rewarded for it.
At the same time, those high up managers would probably be trading millions of dollars worth of shares -- their trades should go through slowly, and that is a mechanism that would prevent them from benefitting from it.
The person who benefits the most, percentage-wise, will be the dude who sweeps the floors at Amazon and sniffed the bad news based on, say, the times that people were coming in and out of work. Or the intern who found a huge security vulnerability and shorted the stock before disclosing it. These people should be rewarded. These people will get a few months' worth of rent while the millionaire just gets an additional Michelin one-star dinner, at best. And the billionaire CEO who owns a shitton of shares will lose money because he has enough shares that his trades will be delayed by an entire quarter.
In any case: you can remove the laws that make insider trading various shades of illegal in various countries around the globe. However, companies would very likely still insert clauses in their employment contracts that forbid insider trading. (And have you eg forfeit any profits you make to the company plus a hefty extra penalty on top.)
If you wanted to get to the situation you describe, you'd have to make a law that makes these kinds of clauses unenforceable. That's probably pretty hard to get right, if you still want companies to be able to protect trade secrets with contracts.
How are you planning to make big trades go slow? I mean, mechanically? And, as I asked earlier, who do you think would be the willing counterparties for those retail trades when you make the life of market makers harder?
(Btw, I didn't downvote you.)
Sure, why not? I mean, impose either on a broker-level or on an exchange-level that if an account which holds 100K shares of X makes a trade of X, it will be 3 months between clicking "place order" and when that trade actually gets put into the order book. But if an account that holds 1 share of X makes a trade of X, it goes into the order book as soon as they click the "place order" button.
Optionally, also make the order book publicly visible and anonymized.
Optionally, also make pending delayed orders to go into the order book publicly visible and anonymized as well.
You'd also have to apply the same treatment to all derivatives. Especially in-kind settled futures.
You'd also need to take dark pools and internalisers into account, ie people trading outside of the exchanges.
You'd also need extra rules that would prevent people from splitting their portfolio over multiple accounts.
How would you deal with eg indexing mutual funds that are held by retail investors? Presumably you want retail investors to be able to trade as fast as before, and I also assume that you don't want to force retail investors to do all their investing in individual stocks. Now, if money is flowing into a index fund, should they be allowed to buy more stocks?
I specifically picked indexing funds here, because they don't trade because of any information they got: they just want to mechanically hold the index. I also specifically picked mutual funds, because ETFs typically don't _trade_ in the traditional sense when money comes in or goes out.
ETFs don't buy and sell stock when they money comes in or out, or when the index changes composition. Bloomberg has an article: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-etf-tax-dodge-lets-i...
Order books on exchanges are already publicly visible and anonymized. See eg https://www.cboe.com/us/equities/market_statistics/book/SPY/... or look at the website of your favourite broker.
You'd also have to enforce your delay globally, as otherwise people will trade in other countries.
And, after you fixed all those issues, my question remains: who would trade with all those retail traders? Institutional trading on exchanges would largely cease.
Not necessarily. You can also trade on securities going down in value (via shorting). Or you can even just bet on eg volatility going up or down or staying the same. (Eg via some derivatives and options.)
Or you can bet on relative price movements of some security vs another.
You are right about financial prices being forward looking, and news being backwards looking. And: by the time you have heard of something in the news, the professionals and their computers will have already traded on it a million times over.
This mostly applies to deeply liquid markets. If you are trading rare Lego sets or Magic the Gathering cards, you might still benefit from news.
Ignore the advice. Pay attention to the topic. The same heuristic works surprisingly well for politics. Whether a thing is going up or down won’t be gleaned from the news. But the fact that we’re talking about that thing versus this is material.
There is a fun strategy trading the sessions in the US market. Basically some days the selling pressure can come from Europe, and as soon as those traders go to sleep (mid US trading session) the market reverses where Americans have different sentiment.
Just something to watch for and assume happens just like you might assume your bollinger band wedge breakout doji is telling you anything too. Itll probably fail a backtest, or you buy some SPY dailies and are right one or two times to retire.
The trading session ends at 4 PM ET, which is 8-9 PM in Western/Central Europe. I guess you meant when professional traders in Europe “leave the office”?
But that's not true either. They know nothing, as much as the rest of us.
The economy (and wider world) are reasonably predictable, it's just that the prices already incorporate all the predictions.
Today's stock price is more-or-less already the best predictor of tomorrow's stock price.
And once that comes into light for an individual, there's no going back.
And once that comes into light for an individual, there's no going back.
He thinks the pandemic did not have much impact on the economy. He reads right wing economists. He was upset Trump was painted as dangerous. Is this supposed to be an example of being “free from the storytellers”? It just proved he is blindsided by reducing his news sources to a few very biased channels.
You can make money by betting against politically-motivated "common wisdom". Trump said the vaccines would be ready before 2021, and everyone else said it was impossible. Some said it could take two years. That became the common wisdom. But in this case they were wrong, and the stock market roared back when the results were released right after the election.
Many people realized Trump had a clear motive to shade the truth on vaccine readiness, but they didn't realize that anyone who opposed to Trump had a motive to shade it in the opposite direction.
The trouble is, journalism does fill a necessary need within society. Frankly, people are going to "talk" and without someone having a reputation for holding themselves to a standard somewhere the "talk" will back the ruling elite's objectives.
I don't have the systemic answer - but tech being the initial problem and this being a good place to discuss technical issues - the people here could probably figure out some potential options and see what springs forth.
Personally, I learned how to read the news in public school and through cross sampling from multiple outlets. Every story's got to answer the five "W"s (who, what, when, where and why). If a story has similar photos/names/content across multiple outlets then that's probably close to what happened. Over time, I've watched the rise of the "birdbox" stories and developed a thicker skin towards them.
More personally, I grew up with a parent and a large set of relatives who wanted to rebel against anything and everything without any need for justification. Sometimes it's because it makes them look smart and they like how people treat them with authority. Sometimes it's because they were wronged by someone in authority somewhere and rebellion feels like a form of righting a perceived wrong. Definitely, if a conspiracy theory landed in their laps they were receptive especially when there wasn't any evidence - just another way of bucking the trend and rebelling.
I've learned these rebellions are fundamentally destructive. Society would quickly get turned over to something more like Mad Max and regional warlords if my rebellious family were in the majority. Though sometimes society definitely is in the wrong - as in the times of slavery or oppression of women (neither of those is a US-only past practice, btw).
The news does fill a fundamental need even in its current state. But it definitely needs reformation. Probably, there's a way to fund proper journalism without burning the house down.
My response: Who cares? I know what my values are, I know which side I'm on, I know what I fight for.
If you're looking for new philosophies or perspectives, I strongly suggest two things:
1. fiction
2. history
I don't think day-to-day news coverage can ever be written at a level where it might affect your fundamental values; among many other problems, it is typically written in a hurry, with a lack of context, and so it lacks long-term perspective.
In terms of books that have changed my perspective on some subject, here are some important ones I've read over the last year:
Reading Lolita In Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Lolita-Tehran-Memoir-Books/dp...
Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, by Sarah Chayes
https://www.amazon.com/Thieves-State-Corruption-Threatens-Se...
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, by Andrew J. Bacevich
https://www.amazon.com/Limits-Power-American-Exceptionalism-...
The Emergence of China: From Confucius to the Empire, by E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks
https://www.amazon.com/Emergence-China-Confucius-Ancient-Con...
Azar Nafisi's book is both a true life action story, and it's also an intellectual journey, a consideration of how authoritarianism slowly takes over.
Sarah Chayes book is remarkably ambitious, not only did I suddenly see corruption as a global issue, but she connects it to religious extremism and then reviews the corruption of the Catholic Church in the 1400s and how that lead to Martin Luther and that era's own explosion of religious extremism.
Andrew J. Bacevich's book is a sober look at all the things the USA probably cannot do, even though it has the worlds most powerful military
The Brooks book about China was eye opening for me. I previously knew nothing about the Warring States period, or the intense intellectual debate that occurred over the meaning of the state and the duties of the leader to the people. I wish more Westerners knew this story.
Should I expect this kind of writing from the daily newspaper? Absolutely not. It's ridiculous. It's a category error. That's now what the daily newspaper is for. That's certainly not what the 24 hour news cycle is for.
Sometimes I want actionable news I can use, which is partly a matter of knowing which candidates might have the best chances of advancing my goals. Especially during primary races, day-to-day political news is useful to me when it gives me the information I need to decide who of many candidates I should donate money to.
But when I want new perspectives and philosophies? I turn to books.
My Google results:
“ Average age of first heart attack is 65.0 years for men and 71.8 years for women. About 80% of people who die of CHD are age 65 or older”
“ Almost half – 46% in 2017 – of all people who die from cancer are 70 or older. Another 41 percent are between 50 and 69 years old – so that 87% of all cancer victims are older than 50 years."
https://www.heritage.org/data-visualizations/public-health/c...
People have about the same number of heart attacks every year. In the USA, Covid-19 added about a half million deaths additional to what normally would be expected.
People get used to what normally happens but when a new additional source of death comes up, they’ll be more concerned. Especially because covid is contagious and heart attacks aren’t.
Not true. Death rates aren't a linear scale. The total number of deaths last year was already set up to be significantly higher than in previous years (not accounting for covid). The actual death rates were lower than expected the past 4-5 years, which tells us there were many additional people on the brink of death. Also, there's a significantly higher number of baby boomers reaching the likelihood-of-death-from-strong-illness age over the past year. These are the types of people who more easily die from the normal flu, so the common sense explanation is that they wouldn't stand a chance with a stronger flu-like illness. That also explains why normal flu deaths were basically non-existent last year. (No, it's not because the normal flu didn't happen last year, or because of masks, it's obviously because covid wiped those susceptible people out)
My guess is we'd be in about the same situation had we done nothing at all (no masks, no vaccines, etc). It's all political theater, cash-grabbing corporations, and there's lots of suckers in the world who believe everything they're told.
It seems to me that its "dominating prevalence in media and culture" came as a result of being a once-in-a-generation global plague that killed millions of people, shut down much of the world, and fundamentally altered the way humans live their lives for the better part of two years.
I am not a denialist. I personally known quite a few people that have caught it. It's a real, terrible illness. But I have always remained skeptical about the true risks, the approach to handling the virus, and the testing numbers. Not helping the case was how much we've been lied to or misinformed by public health officials.
Baltimore Maryland, for example, is still very strict about masks, yet they are closing schools because of lack of air conditioning and Fells Point seems to be disturbingly close to requiring assistance from the National Guard, violence is quite literally out of control. Crime and children be damned, better put a mask on!
edit: punctuation
So it makes sense to mobilize in order to stop the spread of Covid and save all those people from dying from it.
On top of that, Covid has actually outpaced cancer and heart disease to become the number 1 cause of death (https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/covid-19-is-the-nu...) in the US.
Another aspect is long Covid, where it could be 2 to 20 percent especially younger people, have long lasting symptoms. We don't know the real long term risks here. Not knowing is always scarier, people don't want to risk things. Heart Disease and Cancer to some extent are well understood.
Then you have to consider that the Covid death numbers are with all the measures that were put in place to stop it, and with a lot more people getting intensive care which would have died without. What's still unclear is what would death numbers look like if we'd done nothing to stop the spread and breached medical capacity.
Finally, I think Covid is scary, because as a virus it can mutate, and again, that fear kicks in, where you think it's only killing older people, but maybe at anytime there could be a variant that is more lethal and starts skewing things to younger people.
I don't think any of this is related to politics. It all just seems like expected reaction, a contagious disease that kills lots of people, but can be stopped if you could prevent its spread, which has unknown long term effects, and could possibly grow more lethal any day, and which will still screw you over for a few days even as a young lad. I think that's enough to explain the reaction the world over.
I seriously urge you to check your cognitive dissonance to the situation as a whole. This is literally the definition of political theater.
> Covid has actually outpaced cancer and heart disease to become the number 1 cause of death
Not true at all. Did you miss the months of heated discussion when it was found out that hospitals received lump sums of additional money if they checked off "covid" as the "cause" of death? Then they clarified that by making it acceptable to consider covid as the "cause" of death if the patient had any "flu-like symptoms"...aka coughing, shortness of breath. Is it even possible to die without at least one of those "flu-like symptoms"?
I hate to break it to everyone, but we did absolutely nothing to slow down covid. Everything we've seen over the past year has simply been placebos, population control, and political opportunism. Buy hey, can't wait to read Fauci's new book!
Obviously if you can force people by gunpoint to not leave their homes, you can slow the spread (i.e. China)
There are no cities worthy of the name in northern Australia: Darwin, the largest by some measure, is only 140k. The entire Northern Territory has a population of only 240,000, or 1% of Australia.
You can't get herd immunity without a vast majority of the population getting sick, which demonstrably (antigen tests) did not happen in any of those countries.
Last but not least, COVID spread like hotcakes in the warm/dry (often oven-like) temperatures of central India in April.
Not true. That's what you want to believe, and what you've been led to believe. Show me the science that proves this isn't all a load of horse shit. Show me literally anything that remotely proves any of this had a meaningful impact. Anything. Oh yeah I forgot, people here aren't a fan of science and data when it goes against their fragile leftist beliefs.
If what I said is in fact true, it would all appear the exact same.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/22/11875
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33664169/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33712573/
There's many more. At this point there's a pretty good set of studies on transmission data. It seems to all indicate that proximity to other infected people increases risk of transmission, and that contact of contaminated surfaces or others is not necessary. Then you can see that transmission in the air in aerosol and droplets are both possible, and then you can reason about this with the physics on them. The closer to someone else breathing the more virus particle is in the air for you to breathe, the further away, the less of it. The more ventilated the place you are in, the less you breath in other people's air.
The CDC also does a great job at being transparent about their assessment and sources. Read those, and if you scroll down on each page you'll see large list of reference to the studies they've based their assessment on.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
Melbourne really did suppress the virus, after it started spreading wildly in July/August (mid winter – Melbourne is the only large Australian city that has a cool winter climate comparable to Europe and Northern US) last year, particularly in aged care homes. By November we were getting zero daily cases, and it has mostly remained that way until the past few weeks, when winter weather and hotel quarantine leaks have led to another small outbreak, which is again successfully being suppressed.
The measures used to achieve suppression: lockdowns of varying severity, masks, and smartphone-based contact-tracing.
That said, Australia's isolation from other countries, spread out geography, lower population density and climate absolutely make it easier to achieve suppression. I don't believe what we've done would have been possible in the Europe or the US, though I believe the evidence that these measures slow the spread anywhere they're implemented.
You have Republicans who chose to impose lockdowns and mask mandates.
You have Democrats who chose to impose lockdowns and mask mandates.
You have communist run countries who chose to impose lockdowns and mask mandates.
You have democractic run countries who chose to impose lockdowns and mask mandates.
You have many other countries of various political entities that all chose to impose lockdowns and mask mandates.
To me it seems like a cross-cutting concern that affects everyone no matter their political leanings.
Now the decision to have lockdowns and mask mandates where you reside is obviously political, that's the point of politics, to dictate the laws and regulations for residents in a particular place, but I don't see a political motive behind it. The motives seem very much about controlling the spread of Covid within an area and balancing that with the economic impact. Politicians will make their own assessment for this and determine the public policy they think best manages the spread and maximizes the economy.
I would say there is some appearance of political motives from politician who seem to play the "conspiracy" card. Those seem to have self-driven motivation. But I really doubt any politician putting lockdowns and mask mandates in place is having a good time, being the one to do this is possibly a career ending move, it's a big deal, and I can't imagine what political driver you'd have for it, beyond wanting to not cause a mass spread of Covid in your population and look like a failure at preventing it.
Further, if the best you can find for source data is a conservative interest group, you should ask yourself if you are looking for truth, or pushing an agenda.
A friends brother made a suicide just this night, after he had a stroke 2 months ago. He was just about 50 years old.
There's nothing to explain. Human beings naturally care about other human beings. Why would someone work to create a fiction that it's otherwise?
From a "stock" perspective, all of the health and nutrition and fitness related industries are based on Heart Disease and people caring about it. When people say exercise and healthy eating makes you "healthier", it almost always refers to risk of heart disease and sometimes a little bit of cancer.
When some state passed laws to tax sugary drink, that's also related to heart disease.
When people say there is an "obesity epidemic", that's talking about heart disease.
So ya, quite a lot of people care about it.
Sure, eating healthy and going to the gym might save your life but the money makers are people who buy expensive supplements and specialist equipment, not those that eat more salad and less beef and walk ten miles every day.
The casual "exerciser" is a large market and I'd say it boomed in recent years driven mostly by a desire from people to be healthier and live longer, and not so much because they wanted the beach bod. The latter is still part of the equation too I'm sure, but so is the health crave.
The relation between economic impact and how serious some condition is ain't trivial.