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Things You Notice When You Quit the News

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471–480 of 502 posts

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#471
post #105

I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all. The biggest problem to me, seems to be the 24 hour news cycle for things like wars, elections and the like. I was visiting friends during a couple of major air accidents in the past couple of years (The MH370 and MH17 incidents in particular), and was astounded at the propensity for news stations on ALL channels to fill every minute of…

>Not only that, I used to be a commercial pilot, and I could not believe the amount of disinformation and outright ridiculous theories being bandied about by so called 'reputable' news sources. This is true every time there is a news story on about anything that somebody around me is an expert on. It's always "what the hell are they talking about!?" I've seen this directly, too. I've been on the local news quite a fe…

> Frightening. Really truly actually frightening to me.

Don't worry, Congress is going to fix that for you if the "Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 ", H.R. 5181 passes. We'll have trusty folks over at the "Center for Information Analysis and Response" [1] to help us by "disseminating fact-based narratives" (!) to aide in determining whats true and whats false. How handy!

[1] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/hr5181/text

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-07/propaganda-bill-con...

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#472
Here's my personal recipe: * Call cable company and cancel cable TV

* Buy an Ouya (I was a kicktstarter supporter!)

* Buy an older (non-smart) LCD flat screen TV

* Download BBC documentaries

Never have to watch news and ads again! And also you are getting to choose what you want to watch and when!

And seriously, what beats watching "Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity -- Jim Al-Khalili BBC Horizon" and geek out!

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#473
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Items are nominated, discussed, and then a consensus is reached regarding whether to include them. There is information on the 'In the news' section at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:In_the_news The page for nominating and discussing items is at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:In_the_news/Candidat... In case you hadn't heard of it before, Wikipedia also has a sister project called Wikinews: https:/…

Does Wikipedia source news from Wikinews?

Wikipedia does not provide news outside of the 'In the news' section (it does provide encyclopedic entries on current events, but that's not quite the same thing).

The 'In the news' section lists already existing articles, which must contain references. User generated websites are usually not considered reliable sources for Wikipedia, so Wikinews shouldn't normally be used as a reference in Wikipedia articles.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Economist is a good review, but it's laughable that so many people think it answers for "not particularly ideological". Capitalism is an ideology - albeit one basically invisible to Hacker News members - and the Economist has that one in spades.

School of Agnelli and Rotschild (proprietors), the "dulce et decorum est pro libertate mori" sort. (This freedom stuff has to be dosed carefully: owners moving themselves or their stuff, fine and dandy. Cattle moving around unsupervised or mouthing off, not good.)

Yup. And since most of the frequent contributors on HN think basically the same way, they don't even notice the ideological stance.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#475

In Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem, there are different groups of intellectuals that have been cloistered from society, and they may only re-enter it for a short time every year, decade, century, or millennium, depending on what group they're in. Because of this, they only get summaries of the most important things that have happened, and they are left with plenty of time for scientific pursuits.

Excellent novel- time for a re-read

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#477
The thing about skipping the news completely is that it's dependent on you not being impacted by a black swan event that significantly and negatively impacts you. The White émigrés from Russian in the early 20th century and the Jewish refugees from Germany in the 30's show clearly the value of paying attention to the news. Not doing so can cost you your life.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#478
> “Being concerned” makes us feel like we’re doing something when we’re not

Corollary: retweeting about being concerned also does nothing. That is, retweeting about climate change won't reduce emission. It might feel good but does nothing. Retweeting about homelessness and telling everyone to be concerned about it does nothing to clothe, provide shelter or food. The article mentions about a substitute effect and I think it is even strong when it comes to spreading concern via social media, there it feels even more like "doing something".

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greenwald's "excellent" piece is itself fake news. It deliberately misrepresents the reporting done by Kurt Eichenwald about the leaked emails. We know it's deliberate because he's distorted the story the same way in the past and it's been pointed out to him. Eichenwald did not claim that the leaked information was false, but showed, to a high degree of certainty, that Trump campaign staffers were working with Russia…

Eichenwald claims on live TV the email in question was "manipulated" by Russia. Just watch the video that Eichenwald himself embedded in his article (at 01:49). > There are two possibilities: One is that both the Russians and Donald Trump were tricked into believing of a manipulated email or the Russians manipulated it and Donald Trump fell for it Greenwald counters emails were not doctored/manipulated and that sayin…

The gmail DKIM signatures are not a reliable verification that the contents of an email have not been modified. The algorithm and key length of the signatures used by gmail (sufficient for anti-spam) are cracked with an honestly trivial amount of hardware according to RSA in 2003 [1]. Since the premise here is that a state-backed adversary is involved, we can reasonably expect that the keys are compromised.

[1] https://www.emc.com/emc-plus/rsa-labs/historical/twirl-and-r...

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greenwald's fake news is his false description of Eichenwald's reporting. If you read Eichenwald's article, then you have all the "personal experience" you need to see that Greenwald is misrepresenting what he reported. And when you look up Greenwald's past, identical lies, you see that this misinformation campaign is deliberate. It's not a matter of opinion or of trying to judge competing claims. It's laid out right…

Does HN have a hard-on for Greenwald? I really cannot understand the down votes here. I took 7 minutes to skim the article in question, and Eichenwald's point is very simple: his own word were misattributed to someone else, and Trump regurgitated this misinformation, knowingly or not. So many people are arguing from ignorance here...

Please don't go on about downvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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