Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rush Limbaugh
If you can't tell the difference between NPR (on average) and Limbaugh, you've been huffing too much bias.
I'm being facetious.
Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
201–210 of 288 posts
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#202I love NPR. My wife makes fun of me because sometimes I sit in the car with the battery / radio on after I park just to hear a story finish. New Hampshire Public radio has a lot of local news and features too, which I can't hear anywhere else. I'm sure other markets are the same. You can get it on Alexa too because most of the shows are also podcasts which is also great. I've also heard a lot from my conservative fri…
> I've also heard a lot from my conservative friends that NPR is too liberal but to be honest, I haven't seen that at all.
Are you being facetious? NPR is extremely liberal.
> [1] I'm a Libertarian and thus social liberal and economically conservative which puts me in the great position of being able to laugh at jokes at the expense of either of the two major parties.
I'm moderate independent so I too laugh at both sides.
I also don't listen to NPR or watch foxnews as they are a terrible waste of time.
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#203[deleted]
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#204“And I said, ‘Well, so why don’t you stop listening?’” Murphy continued. “And he says, ‘I can’t, because it’s the only station that will go on mile after mile and I can pick it up again.’” Just drove from IA to MI and it's true. Between 90.3 and 92.7 FM there's always an NPR station waiting. Or I could just download their app and listen anywhere / anytime. http://www.npr.org/about/products/npr-one/
It occurs to me that a FM radio should be capable of automatically doing this hand-off, thanks to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Data_System If a station signal goes weak, the radio could scan the FM stations for another station which is known to broadcast the same signal (according to, say, an internal cross-matching database, or some other means).
Also new car radios seem to use SDR for FM reception and simply downconvert whole FM band to 20MHz wide IF and sample that with ADC and then do all the FM demodulation in software. This causes the radio to simply known all stations that are available and have RDS metadata (on VW's radios pressing the scroll knob in the radio screen gets you menu of visible stations that is shown essentially instantly) and to be able to do such handoff without any scanning essentially instantly. The handoff is so fast that it gets very annoying when the transmitters involved have different delay (at least in Europe radio stations tend to compensate for this by introducing delays on their end so the whole network is synchronized) or when it happens in middle of advertisement (which are usually different for each transmitter). When either of these annoying effects happen you can hear that the radio is perfectly willing and capable of switching the transmitter several times per second.
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#205Not strictly related to public radio specifically but still interesting on the topic of broadcast radio (and rather disappointing to say the least) - here in Australia we have a big problem with the (lack of) advancement of broadcast quality, while we have DAB+ broadcasts - the stream audio quality is so bad due to the low bit rate - you’re actually better off switching back to FM.
The average Australian DAB+ radio stream is... 24-48Kbps! Yes it’s generally AAC+ which is about 30% more efficient than MP3 but it’s not even close to FM sound quality.
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#206It's always entertaining when stories of NPR or Foxnews or anything political comes up.
You always see comments like "my conservative father/mother/brother/friend/etc listened to NPR to find liberal bias and found none".
Or "my liberal father/mother/brother/friend/etc listened to foxnews and couldn't find conservative bias".
If your conservative family member or friend couldn't find anything liberal on NPR or your liberal friend couldn't find anything conservative on foxnews, then they must be hard of hearing and they should have their ears check by a doctor.
People are overcompensating too much or they are embarrassed by what they listen to. It's okay to admit that NPR is liberal. It's okay to admit that foxnews is conservative. It's why they exist. If NPR isn't liberal then it isn't doing its job and not serving their fanbase. If foxnews isn't conservative, then it isn't doing its job and not serving their fanbase.
It is just so obvious what people are trying to do and it is annoying.
Edit: Just a PSA... current was founded by the people who founded NPR or PBS. So I'd take what they have to say, especially about NPR or PBS, with a grain of salt.
"whose members were leaders in founding the PBS and National Public Radio."
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#207I love NPR. My wife makes fun of me because sometimes I sit in the car with the battery / radio on after I park just to hear a story finish. New Hampshire Public radio has a lot of local news and features too, which I can't hear anywhere else. I'm sure other markets are the same. You can get it on Alexa too because most of the shows are also podcasts which is also great. I've also heard a lot from my conservative fri…
> I've also heard a lot from my conservative friends that NPR is too liberal but to be honest, I haven't seen that at all. Are you being facetious? NPR is extremely liberal. > [1] I'm a Libertarian and thus social liberal and economically conservative which puts me in the great position of being able to laugh at jokes at the expense of either of the two major parties. I'm moderate independent so I too laugh at both s…
NPR's newsroom is very liberal. But, I find their lifestyle pieces or non-news series to be extremely rich.
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#208I love NPR. My wife makes fun of me because sometimes I sit in the car with the battery / radio on after I park just to hear a story finish. New Hampshire Public radio has a lot of local news and features too, which I can't hear anywhere else. I'm sure other markets are the same. You can get it on Alexa too because most of the shows are also podcasts which is also great. I've also heard a lot from my conservative fri…
> I've also heard a lot from my conservative friends that NPR is too liberal but to be honest, I haven't seen that at all. Are you being facetious? NPR is extremely liberal. > [1] I'm a Libertarian and thus social liberal and economically conservative which puts me in the great position of being able to laugh at jokes at the expense of either of the two major parties. I'm moderate independent so I too laugh at both s…
> I also don't listen to NPR or watch foxnews as they are a terrible waste of time.
You seem to have a lot to say about something you never listen to because it's a "terrible waste of time".
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
In general it's about story selection. 80% of the "stories of the day" are related to minority rights, empathy stories and a bunch of others. Rural white people are rarely mentioned except in the context of an environmental disaster. I like the stories myself but I definitely feel like the average conservative doesn't feel like they're included in any of the coverage.
Is it possible that you would consider any story that isn't about a white heterosexual man one of those? I'm really wondering, because I could see myself keeping a running tally like this once I thought I noticed a trend–kinda like noticing how they put pumpkin into everything in the fall. But of course, 80% is actually pretty close to the number of Americans that are not white heterosexual men. We may just have gott…
The opposite, actually. Someone did a study on this, NPR puts out about six times as many stories about women as it does about men.
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know if you can get it to play out-of-state NPR stations? I'm not a fan of my local affiliate.
By going to https://alexa.amazon.com , "music, video and books", tunein, picking the Dot I wanted to play through, and then I searched for KGOU (Oklahoma City NPR), I was able to play that station. You might be able to say "Alexa, play KGOU" (or whatever station you want).
We've only had our Echos since Prime Day and it is simultaneously great and awful.
We connected it to our light dimmer and ceiling fan and it was harder than it should be to make it work. We would say "Alexa, turn the lights on" and it would reply with something like "I don't know about a device named lights". So, the natural next question is "Alexa, what devices do you know about?" That should work, but it doesn't.
In a quiet room, the microphones are amazing. But as soon as I turn on the fan over our stove, the white noise makes the Echo practically deaf.
Other things like turning on drop-in was an exercise in frustration. Why can't I just say "Alexa, turn on drop-in for the household?" Instead I had to go to the app, give it access to my contacts, turn on drop in on our contact card, then turn on drop in on both devices.
Frankly, I don't think there should even be a phone app. Go all in on the voice interface.