The Dems jumped the shark. https://x.com/howardmortman/status/1781062621967286458 This kind elderly gentleman is not going to be the next president.
Good to hear. What's the job?
How is it that, this far into my career, so much of my work output still comes down to a last minute cram?
yes, of course - why else would I be here? he cites the same statistics (hosted on a different website) that i used.
Did you read the article? Pretty sure he mentions the decline in listeners. It’s a very well written article from someone that genuinely loves NPR. It’s remarkable for that reason.
I actually agree with her. They were unwilling to actually touch the liberal issues or conservative issues. They stick to the official government talking point and that’s it. Sanitized and just perpetuate the lie of the day.
to put it another way, when i hear people like mr. berliner talk about media trust and activism ruling over facts, the dogwhistles are too shrill to hear the surface message of "npr isn't very good", which i think we can all agree with. i view it as one of the best options available, but honestly that puts it at "fine" for me because most are just dreck i am too used to this kind of thing being used as a shuttle for bigotry and polemics about people like me, and the response to the article has cemented that perception for me
well, looking at the statistics, there has been a dip in NPR's radio figures at least based on this back down to pre-trump levels -I've seen other stats on total platforms combined, so including podcasts, online video, etc, that pushes it up to 50 to 60 million weekly consumers. if you cut it to donating members ,i don't know how the statistics have changed because i can't find that data, but you could make an argument either way on whether subscribers would be more or less likely to abandon the station anecdotally, I'm not sure how to respond other than that my experience has not been the same as yours. i think given our past conversations on the subject that you probably have some insight as to why that is. i will say that my mother used to be an NPR donator but stopped because she felt they weren't left wing enough. i think the political and cultural war in america demands more partisanship than NPR can provide.
I used to listen daily. I used to donate. I used to volunteer to answer phones. I turned it off, stopped being a, “sustainer,” and would never volunteer to help fundraise anymore. I’m not alone. It’s become hard to listen. Lots of noise, very little signal. Wasn’t always so.
the meds are working and the job is going great
But people are turning it off. I used to listen every day I quit them they even lost my wife who is a hardcore liberal. I hate it so much I would donate to kill it now. They produce the type of content that we used to laugh at Russia, Iran or North Korea for.
there's a quote i like from a ceo i read: "all the GenZ employees at my company are bisexual and they all have long covid. I'll believe long covid is real when somebody who isn't bisexual has it." in the same vein, i will believe that woke media has gone too far when somebody that doesn't post on bari weiss's website says it there is no such thing as a news outlet without bias. there are no objective perspectives - even down to the AP newsline stories that are just "a train crashed in india today". you have to choose what to report on even before you worry about how to present it. there is no way to avoid it. so how do you appear unbiased? you bias yourself to the status quo and the opinions of powerful people. you appear rational by appealing to whatever is common sense - which is the same thing as whatever is the status quo. there's this weird self-flagellating antiliberalism going around that sees reluctant liberals disavowing their own political positions over and over. some people have internalized the idea that rightwingedness is of the people and leftwingedness is of the elite. it gives the senior financial editors and the oped columnists etc of the world so much airtime beyond their natural habitats. people aren't turning off NPR, they were never turned on to it. there are better echo chambers out there for people whose common sense, idols, and overton windows are different.
I think that Berliner actually was way off in his timeline. NPR almost fully lost me back when Obama did the DACA executive order. Every story NPR did about it was some version of "listen to this sob story about a kid who isn't going to go to Harvard if DACA is struck down by the courts." Certainly those stories were real and heartbreaking in a way, but you never heard them run a story about the wife beaters and tax evaders who came here illegally with their parents as children (and of course I'm not saying those types of people are representative of the population either...just that they never even tried to be balanced). I thought their coverage was a great disservice to the country by not focusing on the legal merits but rather on the human interest. It was so blatantly biased that I see that as the point in my life where the liberal media bubble was popped for me. It (DACA) is probably one of the major starting points for Trump's political career, so it's ironic that Berliner sees their Trump coverage as the beginning of the end. NPR-level liberal bullshit is why he exists as a political player, IMO.
UPDATE: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/16/1244962042/npr-editor-uri-berliner-suspended-essay I used to listen to NPR quite a bit. Now I don't. Too little news, too much messaging.
I recently read Slaughterhouse-Five for the first time, as I somehow managed to avoid any exposure to Vonnegut in school. What a book! It's sad to be reading this 55 years after it was written, in the midst of another ground war in Europe. There's a lot of timeless lessons to be learned from this book, and it's a shame we haven't absorbed more of them. So it goes.
this is a great endorsement... I'll check it out.
Yes, exactly. I still think it's possible, but if the (assumed real) afflictions continued long after public reports, which have obviously been out for many years, I guess that more or less settles the intent question. And if they're doing it elsewhere, not just Cuba... intent. But also... the intel agencies know what it is. I'm about 99% certain that they're about 99% certain what's doing it. If we can think through it here even somewhat well, and they've got teams of people working on it, even part-time, presumably they can e.g. build a device to detect a microwave source (or lack thereof). Nor would it be hard to detect ultrasound or sub-sonic acoustic stuff. I think the press release is "we'll pretend we don't know exactly what it is to give you one last chance to fucking stop it". And: Nah I don't buy that. I think releasing the amount of info in the article is part of the plan to solve it. I dunno why else intel agencies would go forward with this. You're not gonna hear stuff like otherwise. I agree that suspicion is always warranted when it comes to our intel agencies and Russia's, but I don't know what U.S. national interests would be furthered by lying about this. The idea (mine, just now) that this is a psyop designed to make MAGAs realize that Russia is bad has me giggling though (edit: I mean because you'd basically need to make Putin kill Trump live on camera in Times Square to change their minds, at this point)Still, it remains unclear why it took American officials so long to acknowledge the problem, and why they still show no sign of having a plan to solve it.
U.S. officials told 60 Minutes that a senior U.S. Department of Defense official was targeted as recently as July 2023 at the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania
Everybody drop what you're reading and go pick up Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.
So accidental injury as a side effect of attempted high-tech bugging? That is interesting. Thanks for linking.
We had it mostly nailed down 2000-some-odd days ago: And: The only questions are: low-frequency (edit: nope, high-frequency) acoustics or microwaves, and if microwaves, intent, because it could be unintentional (see details in previous threads). I think Havana syndrome is a real thing, but I understand the suspicion. Were there a place in the world where the Russians would do this, it'd be Cuba. Not just b/c of Cuba's Russia-friendly regime, but because it's like 100 miles from continental U.S. soil. And it's tradition, hah.
Booked a trip to Italy today! We’re going by Nightjet night train, with the remarkable timetable of taking an 8pm train and being in Italy at 9am without a single high speed train involved. I’m quite sore from landscaping our garden today and the past weekend. The work is very fulfilling - urban planning and garden planning are both design challenges in the real world that I like. It also vaguely reminds me of my years in Minecraft as a teenager because I’m paving with brick in a pixel-like pattern of squares and doing landscaping, lol.
I'm not a doctor, I'm not embassy staff, and I'm not a Russian agent, so my opinion doesn't matter, but this one has smelled to me like "Chronic Lyme Disease but for spooks" since it came out. the combination of symptoms that doctors can't figure out, the belief in a coverup, pinning it on secret russian weaponry - the whole thing is a tall claim with short proof. the simpler answer is that like chronic lyme, it's a collection of psychosomatic symptoms and random other ailments that get unified and blamed with this label. that doesn't make the symptoms not real, and it's got no more weight behind it than the spy weapon theory, but you can't prove a negative except by showing what isn't true. none of the studies so far have found anything. my views on this are colored by my biases, but without getting into any of the political side of it, i think that looking at the medical evidence and the announcements made by the US govt etc on this is enough to warrant caution at a minimum when things like this come out
This is wild. "A consensus has formed among the growing community of AHI sufferers that the U.S. government — and the CIA in particular — is hiding the full extent of what it knows about the source of Havana Syndrome. The victims offer two general hypotheses as to why. The first is that releasing the full intelligence around Russian involvement might be so shocking as to convince the American people and their representatives that Moscow has committed an act of war against the United States, thereby raising thorny questions as to how a nuclear power fond of showing off its hypersonic missiles ought to be made to pay. The second is that acknowledging Havana Syndrome is caused by a foreign adversary could put a damper on recruitment to the CIA and State Department." Hell of an indictment either way.
Hey there! Traffic has definitely slowed. I probably swing by two to three times a week to check in and read some updates from hubskiers or share a song I recorded etc. I too am grateful for the place. It is almost like a journal of my past ideas, creativity and ruminations. Plus so many great people that have stopped in throughout the years. Hard to believe that mk posted the inaugural post over 7 years ago. Activity has waxed and waned over the years. But Hubski is here to stay. Onward!
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The same could be said of its opponents; capitalism makes civilized life possible. Prices, including wages, are not "set" by market players. Prices come about as a result of buyers and sellers interacting. Sellers can choose any price at which they are willing to sell, and buyers can choose any price at which they are willing to buy, but a sale only occurs (and a market price decided) when the two sides meet and agree on the same price. Customers are the primary driver of technical change. You can still buy a typewriter, but most customers demand keyboards and touchscreens. Public choice theory is a discipline of economics that considers how political actors are influenced by incentives like anyone else. I don't see ethics and welfare being neglected, but there are many new avenues to explore. In recent decades the abundance of data and software has enabled a boom in econometrics while Adam Smith had to rely more on intuition and almanacs. What other discipline tries to carefully measure what matters to people? How else could you do it, if not by paying close attention to how they spend resources like money, time and attention? The base of Maslow's pyramid is formed of goods consumed in exchange for money. The opposite of efficiency is waste, from which no one benefits. A concrete example of upward redistribution (not the result of government action) would be helpful. Social justice and liberty? These are political considerations, not economic. Indeed, this is simply a misquote of the original essay:economists, who have prospered mightily over the past half century, might fairly be accused of having a vested interest in capitalism as it currently operates
Our emphasis on the virtues of free, competitive markets and exogenous technical change can distract us from the importance of power in setting prices and wages, in choosing the direction of technical change, and in influencing politics to change the rules of the game.
In contrast to economists from Adam Smith and Karl Marx through John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, and even Milton Friedman, we have largely stopped thinking about ethics and about what constitutes human well-being.
We often equate well-being with money or consumption, missing much of what matters to people.
Many subscribe to Lionel Robbins’ definition of economics as the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends or to the stronger version that says that economists should focus on efficiency and leave equity to others, to politicians or administrators. But the others regularly fail to materialize, so that when efficiency comes with upward redistribution—frequently though not inevitably—our recommendations become little more than a license for plunder.
Keynes wrote that the problem of economics is to reconcile economic efficiency, social justice, and individual liberty.
The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: Economic Efficiency, Social Justice, and Individual Liberty.
just watched the redone cut of alien 3 and it was better than i expected - kind of odd compared to the other two and clearly the inferior to both, but it had its own something to it honestly the biggest negative for me was all the stuff with the alien which is kind of funny - i liked all the convicts and their weird behaviour, and the little thing with the doctor and ripley was cute even though there's never been a lezzier character to make straight - but there's no mystery to any of the horror elements and the action is really repetitive. i feel like it's a knock on the movie to have the best part be the character interactions when the writing is not standout great at any point the cgi and the compositing is pretty bad but it was the era for it and the practicals were pure and true like they needed to be i dunno, people make it sound to be awful and the director hates it, but i thought it was alright. i guess if you're grading on the curve of the first two then it's not good though
Sent a couple of chapters from my latest experiment in novel writing to an agent. Haven't heard back, which may be par for the course. I'll keep going with it regardless and try again once it's closer to completion. Had a great long weekend visiting Beechworth, land of Ned Kelly and the place where I was raised but haven't returned to in years. Perfect weather. Excellent wine. Great food. Astonishingly friendly people.
Would that not sit under task aversiveness? That is, due to the fuzziness / scariness / complexity of the task, one to seeks to avoid it until it can be put off no longer? I can relate to your description completely, btw. (In fact, it's the reason I found myself looking up procrastination.)