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Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

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Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

#171

Post by JeremyNT »

alberth wrote: post #75

I've completely cut out watching/reading news, with 1 exception. https://www.newsminimalist.com I stumbled across it on HN sometime back. Someone created an AI model to consume daily, thousands of news sources, scores the articles and lists what it's highest scored for the day. --- Ironically, APNews use to work this way. They provide a "relevance score" for every news article they published/reported so that other ou…

You might also consider the human curated alternative, the Wikipedia "Current events" portal [0]. It does not include very many topics, but it hits all of the big stories that are likely to be significant after the dust has settled.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

#172

Post by koube »

bcoates wrote: post #163
koube wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawmakers don't even read the bills the vote on, they have legal experts explain the implications to them. Would you have a better understanding of a system if you skimmed the source code or if you watched a presentation from the author? 237 pages of legalese is way beyond what most people can handle, this is why lawyers exist. If you're saying people shouldn't have an opinion unless they read complex legal documents…

It's not at all legalese. Part of the reason the whole publication is so long is that each of the justices was fully aware that it'd be read by law students, interested citizens, etc. for decades to come and wrote out in longhand what legal scholars could just assume as background knowledge. Each section was written to persuade the reader that the author's position is correct, and nobody gets appointed to the US Supr…

I did some decision reading in college for my GEs. They were all incredibly dry, difficult to get through, and I don't remember a single thing about any of them.

Depending on how old your kids are you might have an hour per day of free time. At an average of 40 pages per hour, this could take 6 days. Or I can find a legally versed content creator on youtube that will explain this to me and be done with it on the bus.

This is a topic that everyone has already moved on about. The fact that it's totally doable to spend 6 days on it does not make it a good idea to do. I would go as far as to say that for such a niche topic, for the vast majority of people this is a bad idea to do, and they shouldn't do it.

Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

#173

Post by staticman2 »

tekla wrote: post #21
starttoaster wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was no need to follow the result of every individual rocket volley in the Ukraine or each individual comment from a politician. This is really it. Who has the time or the emotional bandwidth to spare for following all of this? I was talking to somebody about the overturning of affirmative action, and their response to me was basically "if you haven't read the Supreme Court opinions on this matter, we can't ha…

> That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long. I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? That's cool, I just won't then. It's incredibly hard to have a conversation on a complex legal document if you do not read the legal document.

If the topic is the correct interpetation of the constitution someone who has only read the most recent Supreme Court court opinion isn't particularly well read or knowledgable on the subject either, you need to read what the Supreme Court has historically said about the constitution, not just what the most recent group of judges is saying.

Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

#174

Post by ToDougie »

digging wrote: post #47
avalys wrote: post #4

The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment. The media has figured out that America is the ultimate reality TV show and they present it as such. Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch f…

Isn't it remarkable how healthy and wise our society was before 24-hour news. Nowadays we have newfangled problems like "populism", "anger", "Nazis" - say, where does that name even come from?

I love this comment. Maybe we wouldn't be in such a quagmire if previous generations had paid a little more attention to current events.

Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

#175

Post by bcoates »

koube wrote: post #172
bcoates wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not at all legalese. Part of the reason the whole publication is so long is that each of the justices was fully aware that it'd be read by law students, interested citizens, etc. for decades to come and wrote out in longhand what legal scholars could just assume as background knowledge. Each section was written to persuade the reader that the author's position is correct, and nobody gets appointed to the US Supr…

I did some decision reading in college for my GEs. They were all incredibly dry, difficult to get through, and I don't remember a single thing about any of them. Depending on how old your kids are you might have an hour per day of free time. At an average of 40 pages per hour, this could take 6 days. Or I can find a legally versed content creator on youtube that will explain this to me and be done with it on the bus.…

It really depends on the decision! For example, the mass of pages the Supreme Court has spent on ERISA could possibly count as a method of state-sponsored torture.

I totally understand being over the whole deal, but if you actually care about the issue the PDF itself is more coherent and readable than almost all the pre- and post- decision commentary which is mostly predictable, information-free nonsense.

Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

#177

Post by ChrisArchitect »

This head-in-sand attitude is not a good thing either. It just furthers the rampant individualism that plagues all levels of society as everyone focuses on themselves only. They are "the main character" and why should they care what's going on with anyone else near or far? The effects of that selfishness are detrimental whenever anything collective is required from the pandemic to just helping each other out in a local community.

Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

#178

Post by cbsmith »

vidanay wrote: post #164
cbsmith wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not newspapers?

Do you consider newspapers as long form? (I certainly never have.)

I was more reflecting on newspapers not being mentioned at all as a news source. ABC World News Tonight, This Week, and Frontline are all TV sources, and Time Magazine is a pretty different beast. Back in the day newspapers and radio were pretty significant news sources for people (and radio still is).

I don't know if I'd call newspapers long form, as they certainly have lots of short articles, but I'd say they regularly have "longer form" than Frontline.

Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

#179

Post by cbsmith »

ghaff wrote: post #166
vidanay wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you consider newspapers as long form? (I certainly never have.)

While there are/were Sunday magazines, I'd generally consider magazines more broadly for deep dives into particular aspects of culture, politics, and hobbies.

It depends on the magazine (and the newspaper), but I'd generally agree with that perspective.

Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

#180

Post by standardly »

I cleansed myself of social media and news about 10 years ago and I have no regrets whatsoever. I stay informed via ambient snippets of information that are unavoidable just by using the internet every day, or from conversations at work, and when I want to know more about a thing I specifically search out information from different sources on that thing.
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