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Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

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Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#281

Post by fennecfoxen »

PrimHelios wrote: post #195
fennecfoxen wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are in error. There's a major political party which has been saying "free market", "less spending and regulations", and only turned protectionist as of the last election (Republicans) with the election of a populist president. This change hasn't pleased everyone associated with the party. You can read many editorials inveighing against Trump's economic policies in the Wall Street Journal , for instance - whilst a…

> There's a major political party which has been saying "free market", "less spending and regulations", and only turned protectionist as of the last election (Republicans I've noticed republicans and (so-called) libertarians being protectionist long before last election, so I think that's a bit of a non-point.

All parties are hypocritical in practise, so I'll take your point. For the Trump election, they really sold the protectionism in a way they hadn't before, though. Full-on "Down with NAFTA!" etc.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#282

Post by narrowrail »

jacobolus wrote: post #134
gozur88 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. I can't stand Terry Gross. They should call it "Terry Gross Talks About Her Feelings While Interesting Guests Listen And Wonder What They're Doing There."

Terry Gross is the best interviewer in English with a regular show in any medium, and has been for decades. I’d even even be willing to proclaim her best of all time, if you only count people with long-running interview shows. (There are some documentary filmmakers who are great interviewers, etc., but only publish occasional niche work.) She is invariably respectful, even of complete asshats. She prepares well for e…

As a 20+ year listener of NPR (and Terry Gross), I always thought Gross was the best interviewer without a doubt. About 2 years ago, I stumbled upon a Howard Stern interview and was blown away. Never thought much of the shock-jock before, but you should check out his interview with Letterman from last week.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#283

Post by MarkMc »

benjohnson wrote: post #253
MarkMc wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is paying off debt so important when long-term interest rates are so low? For example, the yield on 30-year Treasury Inflation Protected Securities is currently 0.92%. If the government sold these bonds to invest in long-term infrastructure projects, wouldn't that boost the economy enough to outweigh the increase in debt? https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates-bonds/government-bon...

Government debt is a burden on the next generation - in that light, some consider it immoral.

Is it necessarily a burden to have debt if it is coupled with infrastructure assets? Don't you need to quantify the debt relative to the assets in order to say whether it's a burden or benefit?

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#284

Post by coldtea »

watecmascript wrote: post #279
coldtea wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For he simple reason that the more money funnels through the government, the less choice an individual has in how to use it. Well, if the money funnels in billionaires and overseas corporate accounts, an individual has even less choice in how to use it (unless he is the owner of said company or the billionaire). Whereas with the government at least the individual gets a vote on how those money should be used. > It’…

> Well, if the money funnels in billionaires and overseas corporate accounts, an individual has even less choice in how to use it Billionaires buy things, travel, and hire people to work for them. They don't hold onto their money forever. And if they do hold on to, it lowers the supply of money in circulation, thus increasing the value of the dollars YOU hold. A rising tide lifts all ships. So I fail to see the probl…

>Billionaires buy things, travel, and hire people to work for them. They don't hold onto their money forever.

Their living and partying costs are so tiny compared to their wealth, we can just as well say that they are "holding onto their money forever".

>Besides, it's their money, what right does anyone else have to it?

I don't believe in the concept of "their money" above a certain degree. After a point such gains are so much part of systemic faults and imbalances that it should be "everybody's money" but its just hoarded.

>And just because 51+% of voters think it's ok to steal someones income, doesn't make it right.

Absent a god, it's only what people think that makes something right or wrong.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#285

Post by throw158965 »

crispyambulance wrote: post #194

Not surprising. I suspect the reason is that there is a lack of appealing alternatives to NPR on the "conservative" side. If anyone has ever listened to conservative radio like Rush Limbaugh, you'll know that his slow-wit attempts at humor/satire are cringe-worthy failures unless the listener happens to be a septuagenarian with dementia. The other conservative options are preachers and conspiracy wack-jobs... is ther…

There are sophisticated conservatives, but you definitely need to go to a different medium than radio.

Why do so many liberals listen to public radio?

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#286

Post by gozur88 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #156
weirdstuff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Fresh Air/Terry Gross is pretty caught up in her own bubble, if you ask me. She gets pretty feisty when guests challenge her from time to time, which I enjoy. (Good listening when that happens!)

Contrast her to any of the Right-Wing talk programmes, where an "opposition" guest can't get a word in edgewise. Gross does not berate her guests. She can and does ask tough questions, but she's not emotionally aggressive. Classic instance is her interview of O'Reilly, where he cut the mic and left the interview. There are lots of online mentions of this, though I'm not sure the episode itself is. See: http://www.rol…

The difference is the right wing talk radio shows are on commercial radio. Any show on NPR has an enormous advantage, because they're not packed with advertisements that tempt people to flip to another station. So the host can't really have a relaxed, in depth conversation with anybody.

The few left wing commercial radio shows out there are no different from their ideological counterparts.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#287

Post by watecmascript »

coldtea wrote: post #284
watecmascript wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, if the money funnels in billionaires and overseas corporate accounts, an individual has even less choice in how to use it Billionaires buy things, travel, and hire people to work for them. They don't hold onto their money forever. And if they do hold on to, it lowers the supply of money in circulation, thus increasing the value of the dollars YOU hold. A rising tide lifts all ships. So I fail to see the probl…

> Billionaires buy things, travel, and hire people to work for them. They don't hold onto their money forever. Their living and partying costs are so tiny compared to their wealth, we can just as well say that they are "holding onto their money forever". > Besides, it's their money, what right does anyone else have to it? I don't believe in the concept of "their money" above a certain degree. After a point such gains…

It's not a zero-sum game. Money is just a symbolic representation of value. Value is created by people working and innovating. It's not about sharing a finite size pie. It's a planet full of people innovating and making pies.

There can be billionaires and average people all prospering at the same time. It doesn't bother me when billionaires have hordes of money and private jets. I have an average income, but my life is very comfortable especially compared to human history. I don't have to work on a farm, I have air conditioning, time for entertainment, cheap plane tickets to travel thousands of miles in a single day. I think ancient kings would be jealous of what the average person has access to now.

I am super grateful for all the "selfish ba$#@rds" like Henry Ford who brought cars to the masses and made them selves massively wealthy in the process. Communists, Italian Fascists and Nazis all tried to provide the "peoples car" and every time they failed. Capitalism benefits the common man the most! Even when capitalism doesn't work right, it's still far better then centralized systems.

Another "selfish ba$#@rd" is Steve Jobs. Thank him for helping bring the computing power to the common mans home!

> it's only what people think that makes something right or wrong

To be logically consistent, you must admit there is no moral basis to say what the Nazis did was wrong. Or the nice friendly communists who believe in sharing "everybody's money" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_... I'll take my chances with the Rockefellers :)

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#288

Post by stevenwoo »

colordrops wrote: post #100
freehunter wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is NPR really liberal, or do conservatives just say that because it doesn't have an explicitly conservative spin? It seems like whenever I hear people talking about "the liberal media", the list of names seems to cover basically any journalism outfit that isn't explicitly and overtly conservative. It feels like anything left of Fox News is commonly labeled as liberal media which seems a little off to me.

I'm a Bernie supporting far left liberal, and NPR has a clear neo-liberal (i.e. central-conservative globalist) agenda.

Cokie Roberts might have been the worst example of that, I had to tune it out when she started speaking on her bits in the 90's! It felt like she was a concession to the constant attacks on NPR's budget from conservatives.
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