The other option is to be more realistic - people often have wildly unrealistic expectations of how the world should work and seem to get a bit stressed when they are confronted with reality.
The more pressing problem is the voters who accept policies being put in place based on something going wrong one time without accepting that things go wrong and we have to tolerate problems to some extent. If policies were made after a bit of experimentation, maybe trying a few things in parallel [0] and with prescribed objectives they were to be evaluated against the legislative process would get better results.
[0] The results of experiments like Shenzhen are significant. The US used to be a lot better at letting people act independently too.
> voters who accept policies being put in place based on something going wrong one time without accepting that things go wrong and we have to tolerate problems to some extent
I think this is almost the correct diagnosis, but the real problem is adjacent to that: it’s very easy for opponents to capitalize on political decisions that accept risk. It’s not that people love “do something, anything” policy making—rather, it’s that when the appropriate policy action is either to do nothing or to do something that accepts the probability that bad things may still happen, people are extremely sympathetic to opposing claims like “oh, so you mean you want people to die in <thing> events in the future”.
Policymaking is such asymmetric information warfare that many times the ideal policy solution isn’t even mentioned because it’s understood to be suicidally unmarketable. Leverage and empathy favor the reactionary advocates who drag (for example) the people bereaved by drowning deaths into the spotlight over the people saying “maybe we shouldn’t ban all swimming”.
...except for guns. That topic is off-limits at all levels of government. The problem is never guns, it is mental health, or drugs, or poverty, and the only solution is more police and more people in prisons.
Clearly the whole gun thing is working, though. Regular citizens can all feel safe in public areas and schools, while the potential of a fascist government greed-fueled rise is kept well-at-bay by the fact that the general populace has the right to bear arms.
..and democracy. The problem is never democracy itself, it's the autocrats, or extremists, or social media, and solution is more regulations on private life and more mentions of the paradox of intolerance.
A city bus ran over a 17yo girl during a right turn, in ljubljana, slovenia, and killed her a month ago.
It's been multiple decades of dozens of city bus routes being driven by bus drivers in buses, accounting for millions of left and right turns, in sunshine, in the dark, during snowstorms and hot sunny weather, and we had was one dead girl in a freak accident.
Reading the online comments the day that happened (and a few days after) was exactly as you said... the buses are the problem, the crossroad is the problem, the traffic lights are the problem, too many people on the bus are a problem, not enough sensors is a problem, the mayor is a problem, the driver certification is the problem... everything is a problem, everything needs to be changed, "the government has to do something", and worse. And the media pumped it all up and made it worse of course.
And that the cause can be addressed by regulation. There's no regulation that will protect from bad actors so designing the system to cater to them in extremely specific ways just creates more red tape for normal people.
Said another way, mandating safer intersections will apply to all motorists and pedestrians equally when they interact with each other at a crossing, but if the bus driver forgets to take their crazy pills that morning and the voices in their head say to run someone over, there's no amount of safety systems or auto-stop that are likely to really prevent harm from being done.
In most Western European nations however, we are fully capable of designing and enforcing travel networks that should rarely produce fatalities when it comes to interactions between cars and pedestrians. The reason many countries don't is a matter of political will.
Agreed. Even more generally: the argument "I voted and it didn't change anything" has always seemed to me incredibly self-absorbed. Of course your individual vote didn't change anything. After all, it was worth no more than a hundred million other votes, and some of those voters (deep breath!) did not share your personal values and priorities.
That's facile. Such statements are clearly a synecdoche for the phenomena of well-organized grassroots campaigns getting steamrolled by massively-funded advertising from PACs, or popular votes/referenda being overridden or stymied by small numbers of electeds. Anyone who is politically active has seen numerous examples of this: here's a recent one from Utah: https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2026/05/04/box-elder-commission...
There is a lot of corruption in political systems and false equivalences such as the above do not help.
What is the corruption you are alleging here? I live in Salt Lake City and I haven't heard any arguments against that data center that don't boil down to some kind of conspiracy theory or just a fundamental lack of understanding of scale and engineering. Are you claiming that the commissioners were bribed?
It’s more a question of knowing when to unplug yourself on things that are affecting you but that you cannot control. From government news to something bad happening miles from you. These news can affect you but you have no control over the situation.
Not doing so is actually one way to get depression.
Not sure you can “unplug” from things that affect you that you cannot control? Sooner or later you’ll have to deal with that issue. I do think you can “unplug” from things that do not affect you that you cannot control.
For instance, if you’re an immigrant, and ICE is rounding up immigrants in your neighborhood, you can go ahead and mentally “unplug” as you like. But you’re going to have to deal with the reality of your situation when you get to the immigration detainment facility. And if you’re actively dealing with that reality, are you really “unplugged”?
At the same time, whether or not Trump turns the white house into a cage match spectacle for his birthday, I mean, it won’t really affect most people. So I would think that’s a lot easier to “unplug” from since it’s not affecting you.
You unplug yourself from media and social media. And maybe open the news paper of your town if you want to spice up your life. The rest you will probably hear all about it anyway from families or colleagues if it’s something big. We are in the era of over connections. We need to know how to unplug. It doesn’t have to be as extreme as u said but if someone is as much as affected like this, this person definitely needs a huge break.
For ICE it’s kinda a big stretch can we agree? And in this case the person does have control. This person does have agency over the issue and should regularize their situation as soon as possible.
An alarming number of people seem to build their intuition about the world from fictional sources, without even realizing it. Movies, tv, books if you're lucky, and now social media all warp the least experienced people's sense of reality. If you watch the old clip shows of home videos, one recurring theme is that people got their intuition about physics from tv or movies. They'd make ramps for their bikes that were laughable and then take a header. They'd jump off roofs onto yoga balls and break their backs.
I think we're seeing a much greater extension of that as people increasingly engage with the world through the lens of media and stories we tell, rather than... you know... doing things.
I’m not normally one for doom and gloom, everything is getting worse kind of thinking. However, one observation from the past few years in particular is exactly that thing, a specific kind of faulty media literacy.
Someone will read Lord of the Flies, for example, and come to the conclusion that it says something real about human nature. No dude, it’s just a story. Someone made it up. It’s not real. It can be interesting and insightful, even a useful mental framework or thought experiment, but it’s not proof or evidence at all! But I increasingly see people treat fiction as if it’s real things that actually happened, and that worries me.
>An alarming number of people seem to build their intuition about the world from fictional sources, without even realizing it.
A friend of mine had a machete that they destroyed when they took a mighty swing at a tiny tree. You could put your hand around this tree but still, do you expect to chop through a baseball bat with your sword like Conan the Barbarian? Too many films depict unrealistic swordplay.
To be fair, that's entirely reasonable to cut down with a machete. There's a bit of a technique to it and it'll take more than one swing but if you don't have a chainsaw handy a good machete will do the job.
That’s the crux of this story. There is an expectation that, if you can chop something down in several swings, then one really big swing will do it, right? No. They don’t make machetes and swords like that, and also you are drastically underestimating the force required, or overestimating your strength, or both.
Another problem is misunderstanding incentives. People think that, if fish protection should be a goal of society, any fish protection law is a good one. Not many can think through second order effects, the drag of regulations on pro-safety innovation, the impact of foreign jurisdictions that don't have this law (or only pretend to follow it for their own gain).
And before the question of trade offs there is the question "does the Fish Protection Act actually protect fish at all?" In a very large number of cases it does not.
I've felt for a long time that laws should have an attached "intent" section and one function of the courts should be to invalidate laws which, after a period of being in place and some analysis, fail to achieve their stated intent.
I think it would be good for democracy if lawmakers had to put in writing what the law is supposed to accomplish AND if that were something legally binding.
This option is what Indians in India largely use, and it is no exaggeration to say it has spelled disaster to the society. Don't believe me? Come to India, and walk through how people live in any random place.
Tolerance is just another word for complacency. I would much rather prefer a brutally progressive system like that of China or Singapore than a society suspended in perpetual lethargy.
On reddit i have seen multiple threads that are positive through and through with topics like, "What are you up to today?", "I just finished school and starting to work", "I am lonely and feel dreadful". I read the comments and was met with level-headed and honest comments/interactions.
As in reality it's important to have walled gardens where people can utter opinions and voice their distress or just say that they are happy. Without getting lynched. These global silos of social media is nothing but deserts where the only way of getting through the noice with any means neccessary.
"There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about. Well, we have to end apartheid, for one, slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people."
“What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.”
Postman wrote this in context of television, which is a broadcast channel with no means to interact with it. But in times of social media, your reaction to the news is something you can broadcast yourself, at the very least to your online followers (if we are talking about story feeds). Now, a lot of groups enforce their members to take political stances and show action as a sign of belonging. These might be anything from a writing circle to a raver collective. Everyone already shares the group opinions (sincerely or not), but then they need to perform token activism to maintain their image as a "safe" person to have in the group. Examples of such actions I've seen recently would be:
- A special edition of a writing workshop dedicated to writing poems which can be used by people protesting against the ICE in the US. We are thousands of kilometers away from the US, by the way.
- A street protest against whatever the most recent armed conflict is. The protest has a DJ, a great sound system and everyone is just dancing while singing the slogans.
- A charity party collecting donations for a very narrowly defined vulnerable population in a war-torn area, most often someone the participants can personally identify with.
Case in point is that the vast majority of the population has no power to drive any meaningful change, as Postman rightly noticed. But then, the new source of mental load comes from the fact that you have to be performatively concerned if you don't want to lose your status in a group.
I feel this is somehow reducing all expression of opinion as performative, i.e. serving to heighten the social standing of the expressor. I have a handful of other motivations:
- to persuade
- to develop my worldview (speaking, typing, thinking all use different neural pathways)
- to collect feedback and be challenged
The activism against “performative” activism is equally grating when it misfires, and the movement probably hasn’t even reached its zenith yet.
While others might be like that, the type I'm talking about explicitly does not want to be challenged or alter their worldview. I find a comparison with religion an another poster made to be pretty fair, as the people I know who practice such behavior tend to be either insincere (they don't actually care about politics, but just want to control others) or sincere, but unprepared (they didn't care before, so their ability to form political opinions is still developing).
Note that I'm not claiming that this is the only way people interact with media nowadays. Change can happen if people become mobilized; but the phenomenon I'm describing is the pressure to take any action (token or real) on every single issue the group is supposed to be concerned about.
Yes but I’d just want to point out that the rub lies in who is deciding which activism is performative and which is authentic. I.e. all of my friends are authentic, all my enemies are performative.
It is mentally exhausting to stay abreast of all issues that humanity faces, no doubt. I’ll agree with you there. But it doesn’t take much energy for me to say, “man what’s happening in Sudan is messed up.”
As an autistic person this has never made sense, the things people are willing to do in order to fit into a group, like at it's extreme murdering others. After becoming aware of my diagnosis I've started studying "normal" people and it's insane what you are willing to withstand just to belong to a group or in society. Now I think that some things "normal" people participate in they think is actually fun, like hanging around others doing nothing productive, which after reaching 40 years old, and having a burnout, I also now enjoy just hanging around and belonging to a group. Also social capital, or belonging to a group, has many positive advantages.
> the things people are willing to do in order to fit into a group
Given our evolutionary history as social animals, this is expected. The genes (and memes, in the Dawkinsian sense of the word) for alienating oneself from the tribe and going solo were less successful than the those for remaining in the tribe. We can reasonably expect such adaptations to include sucking up to alphas to avoid being banished from the tribe, being distressed when outside a group, and feeling good when in a group.
It's a math term whose meaning depends on the qualities of the other people around you, not a reference to any one particular set of characteristics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution
"Neurotypical" is the more current and precise term when discussing human behavior, cognition, or neurodevelopment. "Normal" is vague, value-loaded, and scientifically weaker because it implies that neurodivergent people are abnormal rather than simply different. In this context, "neurotypical" is clearer language.
My favorite is when people are selectively upvote/downvoting a long nested line of argument but fail to notice that the sides "swap" at some point and the voters fail to notice.
As opposed to treating fact-free rehashings of Israeli state propaganda as 'non-flattering statements' and decorating such treatments with thought-terminating epithets.
I included specific examples from the latest Iran discussion. Flagging responses dead like that is even more thought-terminating than my poor computer geek writing style.
Please respond to those examples in context/a substantive/HN worthy way and have a discussion, not a fact free handwaving of 'they're XYZ evil foreign power's propaganda'. How do the examples I provided break Hacker News guidelines and deserve not only a downvote but to be actively flagged dead? This is a discussion site, not a popularity site. Flagged is not supposed to be used to shape the discussion, but for severe violations of HN guidelines, which the examples do not rise to. The proper response is a response.
It's not a fact-free handwaving; every last one of those comments is just steelmanning Israel's position without any evidential basis. And if you are so deeply concerned about characterizing them as 'XYZ evil foreign power's propaganda', I wonder why you see no reason to push back on claims like this:
>Iran isn’t negotiating in good faith, and will likely need another round of attacks. America should also flood Iran with small arms for the revolutionaries
What kind of productive discussion do you think this encourages? And given that the intelligence community broadly considers the latter a losing proposition, are we to assume that you think they are all Iranian proxies?
What a great analogy. And IG/Tiktok reduce it into an even purer state - endless random videos, barely if at all connected, ephemeral stimulation you can't even remember 30 seconds after seeing it.
I know 50 year old adults who can spend entire hours just in this mesmerized state of flicking through these random feeds, seeing but not seeing, like some kind of drug induced hypnosis. I wonder what Postman would write today, were he still with us.
> … ephemeral stimulation you can't even remember 30 seconds after seeing it. I know 50 year old adults who can spend entire hours just in this mesmerized state of flicking through these random feeds, seeing but not seeing, like some kind of drug induced hypnosis
To be fair, most people who engage in "healthy" habits like reading, creating, meditating, socializing, or just sitting and staring at nature, could also said to be in a mesmerized almost-hypnotized state, and rarely remember much of what they're experiencing.
Here's a subject I want to explore; the statistical vs individual view of the world. Because those things do matter - to the individuals they happen to. People care about the price level every time they get paid or go grocery shopping. People care if a crime is committed against them - it can be a lifelong trauma. And so on.
They're also likely to care when things happen to their immediate social circle. What about their broader community? However that is defined?
On the other end of that, the ability to do something about things: isn't that ultimately why people value democracy, because it is actually possible to change things, even sometimes for the better?
I plan to be informed about causality and effect - and im voting accordingly to put an end to causes that affect me negatively. So understanding something, not mythologizing or idealizing anything, is a absolutly necessary pre-requisit to voting.
I am informed well enough to vote (when there are two parties) with just a few minutes of the news every day. (And in fact the few minutes seems to have only served to bolster how I was already inclined to vote. One thing I have to say about these times: there is very little nuance.)
For many it probably has a negative effect on their life and their single vote is unlikely to ever make a difference.
Plus people watching the media don’t consume in some objective fashion. Almost everyone just gets stuck in an echo chamber which reinforces reinforces their view rather than making them more informed. They might actually be less informed.
Ah, that mighty CIA- that couldnt even stop Trump from tanking the sales of the MIC. Its not real- never was. Its some drunken station-chiefs, rainmaking Langley from hotel bars abroad.
Er... I got an electric car does that count? Based on $ keeping the old car is cheaper. Also divestment, purchase choices, charity donations, solar install.
Buying electric cars, installing solar, and switching to heat pumps are one of the few things you can materially do to screw the powers that be. The the other one is limiting your family size.
In a world where the brightest minds are paid to intentionally develop tools to make people betray their values (advertising, propaganda, rolling news, etc), I'm not sure anyone should feel safe about what they teach their kids. Many industries, but especially tech, will do everything possible to make them do whatever makes a few dozen people richer.
The best thing an individual can do against, say, the advertising industry, is to become an important person in an advertising marketplace and then destroy it. You spend 30 years to become CTO at Google and then you set the billing system to charge every customer $1,000,000, right before you drop an EMP in the biggest DC.
Limiting your family size has concrete outcomes, having a big family and hoping you can impart the right values so they go onto have an positive impact is no guaranteed. You can hope your child goes onto develop a fusion reactor that fits in a storage container but the likelyhood is they won't be.
In my opinion it's a way to justify your own (perfectly fine) selfish desire to have a child.
There are many places in the world this is not true. I would say about half the people I know who live in London don’t own a car. They travel plenty - probably more than the people I know who don’t live in London. If they really need a car once they get to their destination they will rent one, or use taxis.
For The Netherlands you are really constricted to the city you live in if you don’t own a car. You can forget about going to a concert, a birthday party or catching an early flight without one. Or if you want to do anything fun on a Sunday in the east. Most people I know have a social life or do sports that require a car. If your children play football you really need a car. Last time I used a taxi in The Netherlands it was €210 for a 40 minute ride, that is reserved for the very wealthy.
London is a well connected metropole with 15 million people, not really comparable to most cities.
Edit, reply to Alex as I am rate limited with my comments:
Please tell me how I can cycle the 60 kilometers from the airport to my home at 23:00 with a rolling carry-on suitcase.
Renting a car is around €50 for a night out. And you need to reserve way in advance which is not great for spontaneous trips. Car ownership becomes cheaper and more convenient very quickly. I did car renting and after a couple of €1000/month bills I went back to car ownership.
Renting a bus for the sports team is a lot more expensive than using the parents cars which are at no cost to the club.
Reply to consp: You need the cars for football matches as public transport doesn’t get you there. The fields are outside of cities and matches are in the weekend when public transport is very limited.
> in The Netherlands it was €210 for a 40 minute ride
That's much more than taxis cost in the UK, and pretty expensive even for the Netherlands. You have great cycling infrastructure, and public transport though.
Renting a car is an affordable alternative to ownership, if you need to go to occasional concerts or birthday parties, and public transport happens to be inconvenient for your specific destination. I did that for years - the rental company would deliver and collect from my workplace, so it's super-easy.
> If your children play football you really need a car.
A friend of mine used to ferry his son 1000s of km per year to ice-hockey matches around the country, so I know what you mean. I don't understand it though - if the whole team is travelling, why don't they just rent a bus? Personally, I don't think it's healthy for a child's hobby to consume so much of the parents' time - of course, your choice.
You can forget about going to a concert [..] or catching an early flight without one
Those are really bad examples. Quite a lot of venues are easier to reach by public transport than by car, e.g. Carré, Luxor, Tivoli, Diligentia, Vera; even Pinkpop provides a dedicated shuttle service. And Schiphol has 24h train service, nobody cycles to the airport unless they work there.
Schiphol has 24 hours train service that reaches maybe 10-15 percent of the Dutch population. If your flight lands past 23:00 chances are slim you are going home by train.
Same goes for concerts that end after 22:00. You need private transport to get you home if you are in the 80% of the population that doesn’t have public transit late in the evening and night (or Sundays)
No. Only short trips to the supermarket and such. Most of the trips are done by car.
Most cities in The Netherlands aren’t high density and the Dutch are king of urban sprawl hence the high amount of bicycles. In other European cities with better planning people walk instead.
You don't need a car for football matches. You need a car for convenience because [fill lazy reason]. And if one person rents a van you can take half the team...
Depends on the public transport network where you live. I used to work with someone who commuted from London to Cambridge (yes, that way around). And in Berlin, someone else who commuted from half way to Poland.
Won't work everywhere, e.g. from what I saw when visiting I don't foresee US cities rapidly integrating enough good public transport to properly replace cars within themselves, and from what I've heard about how municipal organisation works in the US even less so for a convenient and well integrated intercity network, but it can be done.
It's also 100 km to the border. The point is, we actually have trains (and busses) that can do this here. It's actually possible.
I visited Davis CA few times around a decade ago for comparison; Go to google maps, choose public transit, and use Davis as an origin or destination while dragging the other end around and see how many routes it can even find.
The rate of successes I get in the Sacramento conurbation are about the same as the rate of success I get for rural Brandenburg, but for most of the rest central Valley (with a handful of exceptions), Google mostly couldn't find a route at all.
By this measure, California's central valley is worse-connected for long-distance public transport even than rural Wales (measured by "can I route-find to Aberystwyth?").
You can use public transportation, bikes, car pooling, taxis and rentals for your rare-use needs, and its usually cheaper than owning and operating a vehicle.
Unfortunately not. Average distance to work is 19,9 kilometers. That is well outside the city they live in. Most people can’t afford to live in the city they work in. In Amsterdam my entire team lived outside the city.
Unless they lived in another big city, this is completely off-topic. Suburbs tend to have hit-or-miss public transit access, and the vast majority of people who live in a big city work in that big city (20 kilometers away would usually be just another district within the same city).
Legally, you can do a lot more than ignoring. If you have any talent for it, becoming an activist (say a youtuber) rallying people against whatever you believe is bad, can be pretty powerful. A single person (again, with some talent for public speaking etc.) has a real chance of making meaningful change this way.
Rallying people to do what? Boycotts? They have some effect, but never enough. The most influential YouTuber I can think of is Louis Rossmann, and you know, he's not a YouTuber, he's a MacBook repair guy who took up YouTube.
The influencial youtubers I think of actually can shape political debate and thus policy - what they say, if it gains enough popularity, sometimes seeps into the political agenda of the ruling party (which is always looking to "score points" with the voters and has its ears to the ground listening which issues and points people are currently responding to). It's basically like being a columnist of an influential newspaper, except you don't need to have the right connections to become one.
The political establishment is savvy enough to score points on things they don't care about and ignore voters on things they do care about. That's why one party supports LGBTQ pride and the other opposes it, but they both support the genocide. LGBTQ pride doesn't really affect politicians' power, genocide does.
I think producing and consuming like crazy could also work, considering how quickly Twitter turned Elon Musk from most important to least interesting figure on Earth. Wealth and sensory capacity don't appear to be positively correlated at all.
The real eco hippies were fueling a 40 year old mercedes on fry oil. Powers that be want you to replace all sources of oil dependent product with another oil dependent product (after all, EVs depend on oil making plastic and grease a cheap commodity). They don’t want you to buy something they already sold to the unwashed masses decades ago. They want you to buy new thing. Never mind old thing still works.
Bicycles and public transportation are better yes. If I were healthy enough I would consider a cargo bike and bring 20kg of shopping home on that (for real). It would be cool. Then buses for unladen journeys.
If the cargo bike is electric, the threshold for healthy enough lowers significantly.
My weekly shopping for a family of four is done on one like that, which I can park like 50cm away from the shop door and 50cm away from my home front door. That’s even more convenient than any car.
It's the nice thing about government in my opinion: we create it to serve us as a community. Our taxes are the price to creating the community we want to live in. From taking trash away to keep the neighborhoods clean, to good schools to educate our (and other's) children.
If we want public transportation, a bike-able city—we just need to demand our tax money go to that.
Are you claiming owning a cargo bike is a bigger privilege than owning a car? Problem with cargo bikes are, if you are living in a flat where you cannot "park" them, you mean this?
The lifestyle I refer to is living in a bike friendly city, being able to afford a multi-thousand euro cargo bike and having secure storage for it. OP also appears to live in a house with a yard on top of that. That lifestyle is reserved for very high earners.
Edit, reply to Lukan as I am rate limited with my comments: I’m sure that those people you saw in Leipzig and Berlin are global 5% earners, maybe even 1%-ers. That is a very luxurious lifestyle that not many can achieve.
Edit 2, again to Lukan. My point still stands that the Germany lifestyle is very luxurious compared to the rest of the world. And even in Germany, you need a decent income if you want to live in a high density city.
"Edit, reply to Lukan as I am rate limited with my comments: I’m sure that those people you saw in Leipzig and Berlin are global 5% earners, maybe even 1%-ers. That is a very luxurious lifestyle that not many can achieve."
I am pretty sure they are not, I don't just see them, but also speak with them. But normal approach is not compare "global 5% earners", as probably all of germany would fall into that bucket, but compare locally.
So can a normal german household afford them?
And the answer is yes. But if the household also needs a SUV and a garage for that, then maybe not.
But I was talking about people who cannot afford their own house. And they could afford a cheap car - or a cargo bike.
Hm. Maybe visit a city like Leipzig or Berlin? Lot's of cargo bikes - some do belong to high earners, but most do not. Finding a suitable place to rent with secure storage is hard, but most old houses for example do have a big enough entrance house floor, where the bike can stand and this is what people do. Otherwise bike sheds in front of the house are becoming standard as well.
I live in Zürich, I don’t even need a bike, I just take a tram to do my groceries. Many of my friends have bikes though, I’ve considered getting a cheap one but my apartment’s bike storage room is kind of crowded…
yeah, the real carbon footprint of especially non-wimpy EVs remains to be seen. EV recycling seem to be as real as gasoline from algae, the slides look beautiful but all mysteriously fail to take off.
Practically, focusing on the things you can change (mostly small scale evils in your community) will have the highest degree of positive effect, rather than focusing on stuff you are bombarded with online that is out of your control (mostly large scale evils).
However, don't think you get vindicated from duty just because the task is impossible. You are as just as much responsible for yourself, your family, your friends, your community, as you are responsible for the person living on the other side of the globe. Whatever you decide to do with that information is up to you, but you will suffer with any of those who suffer, whether that be in life or death. Only the delusional think they can escape righteous judgment.
Pretty much all the power of state/local politics has been usurped by fed/state via "in order to get your own people's money back as grants you shall pass a law meeting requirements blah, blah, blah...." type rules. You can want to improve permitting rules or the local school district's priorities all you want but the system is built to prevent you from being able to do so except in the most limited "within the permitted amount of local deviation from the federal norm" way.
I have always thought of this as a "broken superman." Superman has super-hearing that allows him to hear anyone asking for help anywhere in the world. Super-speed to get there in an instant. And super-strength to solve all the problems.
It's not that you plan to do nothing; rather, it's because you can do nothing about them. The only people who have any sway are the various foreign offices and the country leaders. But even their power is incredibly limited, because humanity moves like the tide.
Sure, Trump can continue chastising Netanyahu for continuing Israel's attacks into Gaza and Lebanon (which will sabotage the already comical agreement between the USA and Iran), but Netanyahu is in a bind with an October election coming up (and a hardliner rival who's already calling him a 3-failed-war-leader), so he can't change course no matter how much Trump (who needs a Republican victory in November) gets pissed off and threatens him. And even those threats will largely be empty because losing the religious right would be catastrophic. And no one else at either helm could do any better.
And because of that, Iran knows it can just continue like it always has, slowly working towards a bomb, with Saudia Arabia and Turkey soon following suit (they can't allow Iran to be the only nuclear power in the region - not with an isolationist USA).
Then we have Russia, whose insecurity and "defensive expansionism" spans centuries, stemming from its geography, so there's simply no way to placate them, and no way for them to ever be happy about NATO (which everyone already knows is a paper tiger anyway - it's just a matter of sussing out where the real alliance lines lay).
So yeah, you're not going to solve it. I'm not going to solve it. Nobody's gonna solve it. We're just gonna ride the tide.
Netanyahu could also simply retire, he has been in politics since the 1970s.
But he would probably end up in jail on corruption charges, which is why he perseveres.
At this moment I wonder if the entire region would be better off if the Knesset passed a law "Netanyahu is universally pardoned, but must GTFO of the country and leave politics entirely". Cynical, but maybe the result would be worth it.
On a more positive note, I can see Iran dropping their nuclear program. It is expensive and the same money could be diverted to the drone and missile program, which is what led to them not losing the war.
Meanwhile, Russia has a very extensive and expensive nuclear program, and it didn't help them against Ukrainian drones burning and exploding strategic factories a few kilometers from the Kremlin. The threshold for an actual use of nukes is very high and they are losing a lot of their deterrence value.
I Netanyahu retires, Eisenkot or Bennett take up the mantle, which is arguably worse. But he's got no reason to retire, given how he's polling now.
Iran isn't going to drop their nuclear program. They know full well that IF this deal actually works out (it won't, but just for the sake of argument...), they can go back to their clandestine enrichment program and nobody will actually look very hard (just like before). It'll be a return to normalcy, except they'll also be exacting tolls on the strait and building up with that new fat wad of free cash. And if it doesn't work out, they just stand firm until the USA gets tired and goes home with a fig leaf "we won" as November nears. Either way, similar result.
Russia is going to lose this war in a slow and grinding attrition that will smack of Afghanistan, that's not in question. But their ambitions aren't going to die. When they're ready again a decade later (and if NATO is still a thing), they'll grab a chunk of NATO land and extend their nuclear umbrella over it, daring the paper tiger to do something.
If you are right about Russia losing the war of attrition (I am not certain, though I certainly hope so), this will result in some internal unrest. The Muslim part of the Caucasus may well secede, places like Dagestan have negligible ethnic Russian population anyway. The next leader will have a lot of work on his hands just to keep the federation intact and Russian politics at least a bit independent on China.
Ultimately, a younger Russian leader who does not live in the past like Putin does may realize that Russia now has fewer people than Bangladesh or Indonesia and cannot afford old-style wars of conquest anymore.
Russia has extended a surveillance pantopticon over the North Caucasus with Chinese tech and disarmed its population. Local ethnic elites and their families have grown rich through relationships with Moscow and only stand to lose all those luxuries through separatism. I don't believe that those republics breaking away is as likely as one would have thought in the early millennium.
The drones and missiles helped them to not lose the war, but they were significantly damaged by the initial strikes. A nuclear capability might have been sufficient deterrent to prevent those.
It also might not. Nuclear powers have lost a lot of "smaller wars" since 1945. Given that most wars are of the smaller variety, and that the threshold of nuke use is very high, it makes sense to think of the economy of the entire arsenal. Especially if your national economy is on the weaker side.
Too many people looked at Gaddafi's fall and Kim's endurance and made a short generalization "it pays to have nukes". But there is nuance in that contrast - if Libya was a friend of China and directly bordered it, no one would dare attack it the way it was attacked, nukes or not.
Iran's largest leverage is in controlling Hormuz and threatening Dubai, Qatar etc. with destruction of their oil and water infrastructure. All of this can be done cheaply with conventional weapons. If they ever use nukes, though, they can expect to be nuked in response.
There is no amount of nuclear capability that can stop a party you are major threat to from attacking you. See Hamas attacking Israel. Of course Iran will still enrich uranium because they are an excellent negotition leverage.
Trump has already tried to use the US' nuclear arsenal, which (according to accounts) caused the Chief of Staff to evict him from the situation room. I don't think nuking US soil (however dirty it already is) will tip the scales in Iran's favour.
Trump could literally just stop sending billions of taxpayer dollars to Netanyahu and the war would end - probably not well for Netanyahu. He could use that fact as leverage. He isn't.
I actually am spending some of my money in an attempt to contribute to decrease some of these things, and investing bit parts of my retirement plans in others.
This is close to correct. We should be aware of current events but not become too emotionally involved with them. They are mostly outside of our control, and we need to reserve most of our focus and emotional energy on what is front of us and our loved ones. However, we should still act on behalf of greater causes with the means at our disposal. Some examples...
world in crisis - I donate to World Central Kitchen
the war in Ukraine - I donate to Come Back Alive
fascism in America - I vote for and donate to the campaigns of candidates opposed to fascism
"We should be aware of current events" - should we? Why? There is an avalanche of current events, I've stopped paying attention and I still find out - its impossible to avoid, I see absolutely no value in paying attention to things that I'm just not interested in. War in Iran - yep, battle of the stupids - it just doesn't matter, there is nothing I can do about it, best to ignore it all. I have friends obsessed with the news, wake up in the morning and watch the news during breakfast - they discuss it endlessly, get a lot of angst from it, its all just noise to my mind.
Doing what you feel necessary or useful at a local scale is still empowering. Understanding that the effects will be mostly local as well is a good thing, but choosing your battles is perfectly healthy.
Large groups of people all contributing small amounts towards a goal none of them could accomplish on their own is the only way any of those things ever get done.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with watching the news though, I would put it paying attention to the news actually takes time from things you could do.
Thank you for your donations. World Central Kitchen is a really unique organization. In addition to feeding people in Ukraine, Gaza, and pretty much anywhere in the world where disaster strikes, they have a very unique model in which they employ locals and feed cash into in local businesses, generating economic impact to jumpstart the shattered economies in disaster zones. Your donations actually make a bigger difference than you might realize.
I was recently massively downvoted on Reddit because I mentioned I didn’t really care about candidates stances either way on Israel/Palestine as it regards to a city-level election. I certainly have opinions and understand why folks have principles either way, but we can’t make every issue the issue we spend our energy on, and this doesn’t meet the bar for me for a city official.
Sometimes online and election media discourse can feel like we’re supposed to be single issue voters on 1000 issues at once.
Israel Palestine single-voterism is particularly frustrating to me because of the weird way it has to infect completely irrelevant topics. As a particularly crazy example, I remember people arguing about Israel Palestine in the context of the Australian Aboriginal Voice to Parliament debate, a debate about an internal representation mechanism for Australian Aboriginal people, incredibly few of which have any ties to either Israel or Palestine, and a group which I considerably doubt represent a single soldier on either side.
Given the shift in attitudes among the public and especially the Democratic voter base, a candidate’s willingness to go against Israel is a superb proxy for whether they will prioritize voters over donor interests.
It’s also effectively a referendum on the current Iran mess, gas prices, assaults on free speech by the administration, and the Democratic establishment in general (AIPAC is the #1 single-issue lobby by far).
Historically that tactic is used by ‘revolutionary’ and ‘liberation’ and reactionary groups to overwhelm and exclude honest debate. It’s a destabilization technique, aimed at gathering critical mass for revolt with no clear second phase. Occupy, overthrow, liberate, replace…
Taken at face value, honest protest, it’s a hate crime against the victims and participants in the actual situation: these chaos agitators steal the cause for noise and invest in perpetual purity and polemic campaigns, it only hurts the victims, but enables eternal grievance politics for the agitators.
Spray painting Nazi slogans on American universities isn’t helping diplomacy half the world away. Flotillas without aide aren’t aide.
The propagandists involved are not dumb, they are funding very tactically. The point is not convincing or helping anyone, it’s establishing political dominance and orthodoxy. Mob rule.
Is this referring to the flotilla full of food sailing towards Gaza that was invaded and kidnapped by Israeli pirates inside the national waters of Greece?
I think it's used as a stalking horse by outsiders who are really just trying to put across the idea 'candidate X sucks and you should shun them like they're poison'. I don't think that topic is treated like it's authentic at all. It's used just to make people mad by influencers who don't give a rat's ass about Palestine really.
We have the same problem in the UK. Local councils went all in on the Palestine thing when their job is basically collecting trash, roadworks, planning and education.
I can’t realistically vote a candidate in who doesn’t talk about trash collection but does talk about Middle Eastern politics.
Sounds like all the noise in Texas right now about sharia law. Muslims are a tiny proportion of the people there, what are the politician all worked up about?
If I lived in 1930 I would definitely care about a city candidate's stances on Germany/Judaism. Even though that candidate couldn't do anything to affect the Germany/Judaism situation, it would still tell me a lot about that candidate.
theres some reason to care - non-federal entities still make and enforce anti-bds laws, and put support for israel into contracts for working with them.
if you want to be able to have say, cheaper government, you need to be elect local officials on the palestine side, so that folks other than just the pro-israel ones can bid
But a company boycotting others for political/religious agendas is not going to be able to provide the cheapest/best service, it’s therefore not optimal to go with companies that practice BDS.
I have come to the conclusion that there is no way a layman understand the truth about current events. So it is best to not at all be aware of any current events as reported by the media or popular opinion.
For example you say "fascism in America", and I wonder is this guy for real? Fascism? If this was true how are all the people who insult Trump on social media still alive or not locked up?
So imagine if you were running a new outlet. All of your readers will unquestioningly accept your flawed narrative! And imagine there are multiple of such flawed/biased news outlets.
There is no way to know the truth. This is painfully clear when you read stuff in the news that you have first hand knowledge about...There is some name to the fallacy of why people still believe in news despite that...
> *I have come to the conclusion* that there is no way a layman understand the truth about current events. So it is best to not at all be aware of any current events as reported by the media or popular opinion.
That is a conclusion that is arrived over course over long time and many experiences/thought. It is not a news or blog article I read once and made me conclude it.
Have you considered that maybe most of the posters on this website weren't born yesterday and have also spent a lifetime absorbing facts from many sources and experiences?
There may have been a time when most people on the Internet were in their teens and early twenties, but I don't think that has been true for a long time.
I think it's still the case, especially during summer. People get busy and less interested in online bs once they graduate high school or college. I've noticed, someone mentions their age here and it skews younger pretty often.
Is not instant. But if trump stays in power he’d pack the courts(not that he listens to the courts anyway), put people in power that would just do what he says and he would start locking people up the instant he could. It certainly is a slow walk to fasicism
Fascism is a way overused term. Personally I tend to avoid it unless we're seeing paramilitary forces shooting civilians in the face. Other people may have lower thresholds.
> ? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployme
A proletarian revolution would be a good start, not sure what this ideologue writer was on about. History is far from having ended, change can still happen through the union of individual wills.
It's all well and good to say "this collective action would change the bad status quo", but even if you're 100% correct, unless you can point to ways to work toward said collective action, it's still pretty useless. You're not actually helping to change the bad status quo.
This is a weird quote. It reeks of pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things. The media influenced how Americans voted in the US election, and they voted for a guy that predictably started a major new war in the Middle East. That is a real thing that happened and has impacted billions of people globally with second-order economic effects. Is anything short of each individual American taking up arms and marching to Iran "doing nothing"?
> People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things
People don't do that.
Politics in US(and democracies in general) have what I call the cable tv bundling problem.
Imagine you have only two bundle packages with your most preferred channels split evenly across two packages along with some unwanted channels. Regardless of which package you choose, you'll miss out on some of your favorite channel and still subscribe to unwanted ones.
You may enjoy watching a channel occassionally at your neighbors who subscribed to the other package but when it is time for renewal, you personally pick the package that gives you maximum bang for your money & preferences.
People will vote mainly based on one or two issues they strongly feel about.
The US is a statistical outlier in almost every single metric. Almost nothing about the US generalizes, not to the world as a whole, and not to other Western countries. Certainly not to functioning liberal democracies.
Value bundling is a pretty universal problem. Maybe Switzerland is less impacted with their direct democracy escape valves, but it's a huge issue in almost every country.
The US has an extreme case of it, with their 2 parties system, but most countries can't keep 4 different issues actively guiding politics.
The US suffers from Duverger's Law which means that any vote for anything other than one of the two big parties is wasted. In my country, we currently have 17 different parties, each with different variations of policies. Some are outliers, but many of them have or have had power to some degree over the years. Your cable-tv problem still exists, but to a much smaller extent.
My take on it is that he's not blaming people for the "doing nothing" part, but rather the fretting part. Of course most Americans can't reasonably do anything beyond vote or throw some dollars or social media sentiment at the thing. One should just take into mind that that is the limit of most people's ability to effect change.
People vote for such a government very rarely - in the US, about once every two years. I don't think anyone would object to you spending a week or even a month before the election learning a large amount about what's wrong in the world. But when you go into the voting booth on November 3 this year, do you expect your choices will be at all influenced by the details of the bad news you read on June 21?
Candidates don't pop up out of nowhere on election day, and building support for either candidates or policies takes time, public debate, raising awareness. All of that is a reason for more political engagement, not less. Given how much power we actually wield to significantly influence how issues are approached in a democracy, we should strive to make more constructive use of the news. There are real, deep-seated problems with both the current media and how people consume it, but we have a civic responsibility to do better rather than disengage, because quite literally the fate of millions of people are influenced by the sum of our actions.
Candidates don't find it difficult to express the most popular opinions in the short time before an election. You really do have to know what they did previously if you want to correctly evaluate them.
From outside the US, nothing about him has really been predictable, except that he consistently lies about everything.
The only predictable thing about this American presidency is the total chaos that has been inflicted on the world by millions of intellectually degenerate Americans. This is what the world sees. Almost nobody is making excuses for him, everybody is trying to move on without the US.
So yeah, in that sense another war is simultaneously an unpredictable outcome and an unsurprising outcome.
During his first term, his continuous threats to north Korea were enough to force congress to restrict presidential powers (the whole fire and fury stuff), and that's not counting Venezuela, Syria and others.
Since January 6th it was clear that he would be willing to secure his power in any way. The most obvious way in america is to start a war.
And even if noone could predict that - the worst part is all the Americans sitting by, twiddling thumbs after seeing Trump making the whole world worse. You are the loudest "democracy" on the planet, but noone demands the necessary accountability from the dear leader. Democracy does not only happen on election day.
He presented himself as someone who has utter disregard for any form of coherence and people actually argued that that's what made him palatable to the masses. I don't think that someone who voted for him can in good faith claim they didn't know he would betray his promises. All they wanted Is for him to own the libs
How many wars and military actions did he start in his first term? How many times did he do the opposite of what he said he did? The specific case is unpredictable, the general pattern isn't.
I agree with this. What was certain and predictable was that Harris was a war candidate (the Democrats presided over the first year of genocide and were intending to continue).
MAGA was going to be bad in some way, but the Democrats were very bad in very known ways, so voting for whoever was at least saying they were against war was the rational decision for anyone who cared about not having genociders at the helm of the state.
To give you the benefit of the doubt at best it would be like 5/10 vs 6/10. There wasn’t ever any difference that Soto’s have ever recruited into any decision. The only reason someone would have thought Harris was a war candidate would have been because rogan or similar said it.
Harris was a known to be bad with respect to the war issue, became very obviously bad when she started campaigning with Liz Cheney. Trump was less known bad, so that difference should certainly have swayed your decision.
>MAGA was going to be bad in some way, but the Democrats were very bad in very known ways, so voting for whoever was at least saying they were against war was the rational decision for anyone who cared about not having genociders at the helm of the state.
This implies that Donald Trump/Republicans weren't pro-Zionist and didn't support Israel which is obviously untrue.
The truth is there was no "non-genocide" candidate between the two parties and pretending otherwise - particularly by voting for Trump - was simply self-delusion.
If you paid attention to his actions while in office, rather than a selection of his words while on the campaign trail, it was pretty clear he wasn't in the least bit interested in being a "peace president;" he just wanted the Nobel Peace Price because Obama got one.
You'd have trouble finding a candidate who wouldn't predictably start a major war in the middle East. Biden and Trump 1 were kind of exceptions. Kamala certainly seemed pro-war-in-the-middle-East with her support for Israel, so she's out. Who did you vote for instead?
The slight problem here is that the war was started by Netenyahu, whom US voters are unable to remove. But yes, I doubt Harris would have gone for the decapitation strike that destabilized everything.
netenyahu may have convinced trump tp go to war, but its the US that started the war.
it would be a different case, and very likely a different iranian response if israel had started the war, and the US did its more typical "is nearby and shoots down missiles flying overhead"
Netenyahu has been pushing the "Iran is building a nuke; they're literally a week away" line for decades.
Trump and the day drinker were the first senior US officials to take that seriously - Trump kicked that off by neutering a working and workable international agreement that capped HEU levels and allowed routine inspection and on site monitoring agreement, with more stupidity following.
Harris, and most other "traditional" (non MAGA) candidates typically follow the advice of the core military and intelligence services; it's unlikely any career politician would have jumped into open assault on either alleged drug boats or Iran.
No, but neither was Musk, yet DOGE happened. Trump isn't just a malignant sadistic narcissist, he's also a vulnerable senior with dementia that others can exploit.
See what I mean? America keeps starting wars in the middle east. Go back further in time and it was Obama, then Bush, then a little bit of Clinton, then the other Bush. It doesn't matter who or what party they're in, they mostly end up doing it anyway. No reason to think Harris would be anything different, especially considering her statements of promising military support to Israel.
No I dont see what you mean. You are trying to Harris sound the same as Trump. That is extremely dishonest framing. There is a reason why Israel and pro-Israel Americans went with Trump - because he was giving them a lot more of what they wanted.
Trumps military/war track record so far is a.) Iran war b.) Venezuela kidnapping c.) pro-Russia stance in Ukraine d.) board of peace composed of dictators and murderers e.) regular boatsmen murders f.) trying to steal Greenland. The Harris "refuses to take pro-palestinian side and refuses to abandon Israel entirely, but still not enough for pre-Israel side to accept her" is weak sauce.
We're talking about before his election. What made it predictable that Trump would bomb Iran but Harris wouldn't? Whoever the president is, the forces that make America fight wars seem to keep on successfully pushing them to do it. Both their parties started a lot of wars in the middle east with their previous presidents (Obama and Bush II).
Trump avoided briefings like they were his uglier children, famously first term rumours claimed the intelligence crowd had to dumb down two hour compact briefings to 5 minute cartoon animated toilet reading fodder.
Harris has a background as a prosecutor and has a track record of being literate and processing stacked feet thick piles of paper.
The force pushing to bomb Iran has always been Israel, the counter force has always been detailed backlogs of military exercises that relentlessly conclude that to be a bloody stupid idea.
It was predictable that Harris would take good advice (and perhaps follow that), and equally predictable that Trump would bluster his way forward and ignore the existing weight of experience and prior exercises.
FWiW I would not have predicted that Trump would stick himself into Iran ... I honestly thought he was stupid, just not that stupid. Although the Obama deal was famously one of his weird tic like bugaboos .. correctly factoring in how much room the former POTUS occupied in the Trumple cranium was likely where I failed.
It sounds like you are trying to both-sides away the fact that Trump (or "Trump 2", if you insist) is an outlier here. US support for Israel has been pretty invariant over the years but nobody went along with Bibi's wet dream until now.
On the other hand - you may not choose a whether a president will start a war in the middle east, but Trump's cost was abnormally low compared to his predecessors in one very important area - soldier's coffins coming home. His adventurism may have had substantial financial costs, but is better than Bush or Obama on deaths while in combat.
Trump is unhinged enough to not care about sunk cost fallacy. The deal is still terrible though.
> Middle East, inflation, crime and unemployment, preserving the natural environment, NATO, OPEC, the CIA, Iran
Not voting for republican part or candidates would fix a lot of those things, although I will probably be heavily downvoted for this since cryptobros like their low taxes at all costs.
It would be a start. D isn't much better than R, but it is slightly better.
Although R really knows how to do politics - you see how they're all suddenly anti-Israel a few months before the midterms when most of the country is probably going to vote against Israel?
Here's another example, let's say we got the news from Andromeda galaxy that Andromeda Hitler is killing lot of people? What do you expect me to do ? Since space and time are equal, similarly we don't lose sleep over bad events that happened in the past.
I don't know, I am a naturally anxious person even before I started reading the news daily, and I'm fine. Seeing the brutal chaos of the world definitely makes me appreciate the peace at home more. It's a grounding experience to be aware of the good and bad things that happen in the world.
One thing that really helped me was to start viewing my news media in black and white.
Without the colored dressing, a lot of (especially partisan political) articles have much less emotional impact on me.
Note: this worked particularly well for written media and less well for vocal media
I think I like charts too much for text only, but this really does capture a common problem I have. A lot of articles seem to come with images that are almost designed to get the reader worked up. I think, at least in most cases, as a side effect, of selecting for reach and clickthrough rate? But that doesn't really help me and I'm not sure how to eliminate the "look how much of a jerk this guy is!" photos without also losing the charts.
It's still mostly bad news? Also I don't see that big of a difference than the default NPR website articles, all they add is a bit of text formatting and an image.
They aren’t able to control whether the important facts people want to be updated on are positive or negative. But I find it less addictive to read the news with minimal colors and no images.
Avoiding the news and consuming it on your own terms infrequently is a fantastic way to solve this problem. Step 1: cut your cable and use your television as a computer monitor only. Source: myself.
gives me the idea, rank news items according to geographic distance, and "blast radius"
closer to you gives higher rank in the feed, tighter blast radius lower rank.
example, events in your present location rank higher, events 100miles away rank lower. police stopping someone for a seatbelt and issuing a ticket, likely ranks lower, vs evacuation order for city ranks higher.
I only read local news. It’s pretty nice I don’t feel stressed at all. Turns out random shit far away has no significant effect on my life. And even if it did it’s not like I can do anything about it
What's your last local news source? I'm jealous of you that you have one. The place where I live had their local newspaper bought out and (in effect) shut down by Alden Global Capital (google them) nearly a decade ago. There's nowhere to go to learn about what goes on in city council or school board meetings, short of attending or logging into their streams - which, at least it's good we have those, but is hardly practical for most residents.
I live in Baltimore county and most of our local news is homicides and stuff like that.
I know some people who moved to Delaware beaches and they told me that there the local news is just folks talking about government administration stuff, which was pretty mind-blowing to me. I would like to check this out.
Same here, but I live in a developing country. I usually switch to international news (or tech news, or no news at all) because local news is mostly about murders and other terrible things. I have family in Portugal, and when I visited, I remember the local news being mostly about pastries and folklore events. I watched TV every day while I was there.
I used to read local news until they made an article "Top Ten dangerous places in our city" where they just listed a bunch of places that someone considered scary based on vibes.
I was talking to my aunt, who has never been much for technology, during covid. Never really had a tv in her home, etc. She's late 70's maybe early 80's now. Anyway, I was asking her how she was doing with all the chaos and she was just like "umm well I just live my life. I go out and volunteer and go camping, not much has changed...". She was just very unbothered by all of it (and she was a nurse for decades, so not in a "masks are criminal, social distancing doesn't work" way).
I more and more identify with that ethos. I want to be informed, but I don't want to be miserable from the bombastic 24/7 news cycle being shoved in my face when I can't do much about any of it.
You can vote against this trash and still not consume 99% of the "news" content people pretend is information. You don't need to know "the latest" about this second "administration". Consuming "news" is not a civic duty, it just is bad for you and a waste of your time. Don't be fooled.
I don't think most Americans even knew what the strait of hormouz was, expecting them to vote differently based on that last November is wild. Trump constantly ran as the "no more wars" president and people fell for it. At that point, the blame is just for believing in that he was not lying. But strait of hormouz was a non topic for almost the entire world before the war.
but isn't expensive gas a local issue so local news will cover it regardless. That doesn't mean Americans will care about Hormouz in even an year imo. People only care when it affects their wallets.
November 2024 nobody could have reasonably predicted that the strait of Hormuz would be closed in February 2026 because Trump would declare war on Iran.
But they could have seen he was a fool and predicted that putting a fool in charge of the presidency would make something bad happen.
Last year we had stupid tariff wars, now we have stupid actual wars and a screw worm infestation. Who knows what's next? I don't, but I can predict it will be stupid.
I mean yes, but there are reasons why people vote for him even though it might seem stupid to you or me. Politics is a weird dirty game and its not just about good or bad or smart or stupid. It's mostly theatrics and media management. It kind of makes sense a reality TV actor can do well in these situations funny enough.
I agree with the sentiment generally, but there have been lots of times in history when recognizing that you should leave a place turned out to be life or death. The start of WW2 was random shit far away for a lot of people until it wasn’t.
I wish my local news wasn't mostly filled with people going missing and fires but at least balanced it with "this new restaurant just opened". If anything my local news is more fear driven than the national news.
> Humans evolved to pay close attention to danger, but today that instinct is being overwhelmed by an endless supply of bad news from around the world
This insinuates that the human brain can not cope with overflow of bad news. That's wrong. For instance, I stopped consuming horrible news media for the most part. So I get fewer bad news in. I also don't watch everything on youtube either; rather than watching a video where person xyz lost family members abc in some crash, I watch and study surstromming reaction videos (these are fascinating to me, because of group behaviour and also individual's showing varied results here). I can select what I do and watch; the whole article feels as if someone had a need to publish a paper rather than make an objective observation. Publish or perish days...
It's simple. The powers that be rely on the constant stream of bad news to convince the terrified population to give away what control they have. It's a spectrum- dictatorships use it, sure, but even democracies work with media to control the message, so people even continue feel the basic need to be governed. The whole thing is a psyop or sorts.
I do watch how much I'm consuming the news as it does impact my day, but part of the problem is that when I eventually go to look at news online, I'm immediately confronted with 8+ blurbs of what's made up of a majority of bad news.
I would like to look at one bad thing at a time, please, but I know that's likely not compatible with money making models.
One of the many effects of AI generated content is the even increased ubiquity of bad news. I wouldn't be suprised if more people develop problematic news consumption when the clickbait battle between AI generated text with the intent to grab human attention for ads or any kind of manipulation gets more and more extreme. Btw this article is 56% AI generated according to pangram, but I don't know how reliable those results really are (https://www.pangram.com/history/825843ae-35fc-4543-a41f-df49...). But my instinct tells me that it is not completey human, it sounds like telling an AI to be very concise, factual and eliminate wordiness, which a human who writes for a science online mag would do as well, but it reads "wrong", there is a lack of the natural rhythm human brains have when connecting sentences.
> The fix is to manage the consumption and the sources. …
> Containing news consumption to defined windows of time …
> Choosing depth over volume
Golden.
TBH, we must concentrate on what matters to us. When people cross that boundary, they not only hurt themselves, but end up hurting someone close by for issues from far far away.
Nah. People actively voted for a guy who said no war. Then he got the USA into a dumb war. Just like all the rest.
Voting has objectively not produced the results that the people have wanted, and this is not new. Voting doesn’t work. Being “informed” changes nothing. The only way the hoi polloi can have any effect whatever is typically through rather violent uprising. This works for maybe a generation, and then it all starts falling apart again.
Well, voting doesn't produce the results you want when you vote for a liar. That doesn't mean that voting never produces the desired result, just that it doesn't in that condition.
Well, politicians are generally liars. Trump, Obama, Biden, Bush, Clinton, Reagan… we can go all the way back to McKinley and I could easily say that the campaign people voted for was not what was delivered. Even more, it was usually the opposite.
Stupid shit should've been on everyone's bingo card. The exact format the stupid shit would take was hard to predict but there was definitely going to be a lot of it.
No, you're just highly misinformed. I could have told you a decade ago that all of this will play out in a second Trump term. The invasion of Iran was always going to be the culmination of the "War on Terror" and it was clear that Trump aligned himself with that political faction since long ago.
Are they? I think it could be the opposite, ironically. Trump is in many ways the result of news media directed at voters, which was mostly misinformation and propaganda.
Things are worse than ever. And these types of opinions are just Ostrich strategies. This worked fine 20 years ago, and would be a wildly inappropriate and irresponsible way to live today.
Yes, a lot of the news is sensationalized and blown out of proportion.
But also YES, things are absolutely trending in the wrong direction and you should both be aware of that and be loudly screaming about it. Going to protests, boycotting companies run by these CEOs leading us into oligarchy, and letting people know your stance.
The idea that "I can't do anything about it, so I'll just bury my head in the sand" is the rhetoric that the people benefitting from rigging the system want you to have. It makes it easier for them to screw you over.
No, your brain was neven designed for this much bad news. It also wasn't designed for the Internet, tv, smartphones, processed food, soda, painting, sleeping in a bed, to infinity. It's a garbage argument that falls apart at first glance.
Edit to add: I highly recommend meditation and days off from technology. But the answer is not what many people in this thread are proposing. Steve Bannon's "flood the zone" strategy is winning.
What an awful lot of "them". This populist rhetoric is way too easy, not to mention dangerous. The problems are real and as human beings we are all implicated in them. Not just the faceless "them" but also you, me, us.
Once ‘them’ disappears brain loses the control, leading to unbearable stress, and we are back to where we’ve started with this article.
It is ironic that original comment proposes to face the problem head on while applying typical ‘feel good’ and ‘stay in control’ mechanisms that have nothing to do with facing reality.
The grounded way is to acknowledge that you have limited or no control about the situation. And that oftentimes we are all part of the very same problem. Only from there you can work through the resulting pain and fear and other hard to bear feelings to actual meaningful strategies. This, however, requires years of emotional tolerance training and oftentimes therapy which (again, ironically) very few people have time or motivation for nowadays.
Reading Factfulness was an epiphany for me: our brains are wired to pay attention to the superdramatic in a way that is now harmful to it - the same way that preferences for sugar and fat are now harmful.
Factfulness helped to show me that, despite our brain's bias, the world is actually consistently getting better.
This was published in 2018, vut I believe some things have worsened in the last years for the west. Some examples are: Housing crysis, wars, rise of the alt right, loneless epidemic, betting, scrolling addiction.
I am at a point where i block people talking about specific issues i already know about. I already know it's bad, either tell me how i can help or leave me out of it.
This is the type of comment that I expect to read on ‘looksmaxxing’ forums, where impressible young males are taught how to live life in very mechanical terms by sociopaths.
There are better ways to stimulate your adrenaline and stress response than picking fights with strangers.
> Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.
We're having too much of these look back to hunter-gatherer state of affairs to explain modern phenomenons. It feels like they didn't really bother looking for an actual relevant argument.
On one side, did hunters who analyzed the situation before moving actually not survive ? How would someone even prove such a claim ?
On the other side our brains have excelent plasticity and we're constantly surprised at how it can adapt to extremely impacting life events. Is our cognitive stuck to where it was hundred of centuries ago and couldn't adapt to the printing press or the internet ?
We might have social issues and huge problems to solve to better handle our current technical landscape, but going back to Neanderthals to find an explanation is a waste of time and good will IMHO.
There must be better science out there and people actually trying to tackle these kind of issues. What would be the Hank Green like people of these fields to who we should pay more attention?
No, human knowledge has definitely grown over time and the modern human in the modern society has access to a lot more information. But in terms of evolution, our brains are still pretty much what they used to be back then. That timeline isn't long enough to actually evolve our brain and how it processes things.
A lot of biases are present in our mind precisely due to how biology evolved the systems over millions of years. Humans have been around for only 300k-ish years.
However, you do need to study and research about how the brain works if you want to make these point and a lot of writers just misrepresent/misunderstand things because they don't do their research enough.
I think someone like Daniel Kahneman can be a good read if you are interested.
It's not a perfect analogy, but I understand the evolution argument as our "hardware" taking time to drastically change, and agree with it. From there, our "software" can IMHO evolve a lot faster, and we're probably able to rewrite how we use the hardware to a very low level. What esports player do in their heads on daily basis never stops impressing me.
> I think someone like Daniel Kahneman can be a good read if you are interested.
Thanks ! It's a bit sad D.Kahneman was already of pretty old age when the replication crisis hit the field. I saw a few of his talks from a few years later but don't remember him addressing any of the underlying research being put into doubt.
Given the audience here, I think an adjacent analogy would be “if we were to understand tech today, do we always go back to the beginning of tech?”
Then the answer is more clear as yes and no. Obviously much of our tech today adapts to modern innovations and standards, but it would not be hard to quickly find examples where even the most cutting edge tech are still being affected by the earliest decisions or natural limitations.
I've been thinking about it for a while and like the tech analogy a lot.
The interesting part to me is that we have many relics of earlier choices, but the reason they were set that way and the reasons we kept these choices around are completely different.
For instance choosing to start time at 1970 was to work around space limitations IFAIK, but we're still using that norm out of inertia and compatibility concerns.
I think that kind of logic applies to many human things as well, for instance at one point physical differences between men and women had a huge practical impact on the kind of "work" they could optimally do, yet the same kind of labor segregation today would come from a totally different place.
> “We're having too much of these look back to hunter-gatherer state of affairs to explain modern phenomenons.”
Sparks my imagination. Like sibling relations when you’re old. You must go back further and further to a time of innocence and ignorance to find agreement and common ground.
Here's an idea... How about we put constructive and intelligent people in charge instead of the most compelling narcissists.
I have no doubt the waterfall of bad news could be good news if society were properly engineered in accordance with our scientific progress, rather than in accordance to the easiest accumulation of capital.
News is a business. The mainstream media has made tons of money fabricating conflict or drama (see increase in use of “white supremacy” or “racism” in news). This has created mental angst in Democrats.
Thankfully the recent soccer World Cup is showing the world that America is the greatest country on earth. At least the foreigners will learn the truth (the democrats? That’s another story of perpetual self depression).
The other option is to be more realistic - people often have wildly unrealistic expectations of how the world should work and seem to get a bit stressed when they are confronted with reality.
The more pressing problem is the voters who accept policies being put in place based on something going wrong one time without accepting that things go wrong and we have to tolerate problems to some extent. If policies were made after a bit of experimentation, maybe trying a few things in parallel [0] and with prescribed objectives they were to be evaluated against the legislative process would get better results.
[0] The results of experiments like Shenzhen are significant. The US used to be a lot better at letting people act independently too.
> voters who accept policies being put in place based on something going wrong one time without accepting that things go wrong and we have to tolerate problems to some extent
I think this is almost the correct diagnosis, but the real problem is adjacent to that: it’s very easy for opponents to capitalize on political decisions that accept risk. It’s not that people love “do something, anything” policy making—rather, it’s that when the appropriate policy action is either to do nothing or to do something that accepts the probability that bad things may still happen, people are extremely sympathetic to opposing claims like “oh, so you mean you want people to die in <thing> events in the future”.
Policymaking is such asymmetric information warfare that many times the ideal policy solution isn’t even mentioned because it’s understood to be suicidally unmarketable. Leverage and empathy favor the reactionary advocates who drag (for example) the people bereaved by drowning deaths into the spotlight over the people saying “maybe we shouldn’t ban all swimming”.
...except for guns. That topic is off-limits at all levels of government. The problem is never guns, it is mental health, or drugs, or poverty, and the only solution is more police and more people in prisons.
> and the only solution is more police and more people in prisons.
The solution is more guns, or so I'm told. If only more people were "packing heat" then surely criminals wouldn't dare to commit crimes.
Just disregard the circular firing squads that too often occur when these would-be heroes start overreacting to everything, including each other.
Clearly the whole gun thing is working, though. Regular citizens can all feel safe in public areas and schools, while the potential of a fascist government greed-fueled rise is kept well-at-bay by the fact that the general populace has the right to bear arms.
Nice sarcasm
..and democracy. The problem is never democracy itself, it's the autocrats, or extremists, or social media, and solution is more regulations on private life and more mentions of the paradox of intolerance.
A city bus ran over a 17yo girl during a right turn, in ljubljana, slovenia, and killed her a month ago.
It's been multiple decades of dozens of city bus routes being driven by bus drivers in buses, accounting for millions of left and right turns, in sunshine, in the dark, during snowstorms and hot sunny weather, and we had was one dead girl in a freak accident.
Reading the online comments the day that happened (and a few days after) was exactly as you said... the buses are the problem, the crossroad is the problem, the traffic lights are the problem, too many people on the bus are a problem, not enough sensors is a problem, the mayor is a problem, the driver certification is the problem... everything is a problem, everything needs to be changed, "the government has to do something", and worse. And the media pumped it all up and made it worse of course.
I think the biggest thing that people refuse to accept is that the optimal number of accidental deaths is non zero
And this carries on for all the other sources of injury and other "bad" things. Provided, of course, the cause it's explicit and direct.
And that the cause can be addressed by regulation. There's no regulation that will protect from bad actors so designing the system to cater to them in extremely specific ways just creates more red tape for normal people.
Said another way, mandating safer intersections will apply to all motorists and pedestrians equally when they interact with each other at a crossing, but if the bus driver forgets to take their crazy pills that morning and the voices in their head say to run someone over, there's no amount of safety systems or auto-stop that are likely to really prevent harm from being done.
In most Western European nations however, we are fully capable of designing and enforcing travel networks that should rarely produce fatalities when it comes to interactions between cars and pedestrians. The reason many countries don't is a matter of political will.
Agreed. Even more generally: the argument "I voted and it didn't change anything" has always seemed to me incredibly self-absorbed. Of course your individual vote didn't change anything. After all, it was worth no more than a hundred million other votes, and some of those voters (deep breath!) did not share your personal values and priorities.
That's facile. Such statements are clearly a synecdoche for the phenomena of well-organized grassroots campaigns getting steamrolled by massively-funded advertising from PACs, or popular votes/referenda being overridden or stymied by small numbers of electeds. Anyone who is politically active has seen numerous examples of this: here's a recent one from Utah: https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2026/05/04/box-elder-commission...
There is a lot of corruption in political systems and false equivalences such as the above do not help.
What is the corruption you are alleging here? I live in Salt Lake City and I haven't heard any arguments against that data center that don't boil down to some kind of conspiracy theory or just a fundamental lack of understanding of scale and engineering. Are you claiming that the commissioners were bribed?
Why build data centers in water scarce, often hot deserts?
Perhaps folks are also upset the DCs will host AI that may affect their job prospects or at least compensation?
Isn't the salt lake an environmental disaster waiting to happen, especially as it is drained for more development?
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All no doubt true and none of it contradicts my point.
> After all, it was worth no more than a hundred million other votes
Not strictly true for presidential elections.
My vote cast in CT literally matters more than someone else's vote cast in CA. Yay electoral college!
But that’s because CA matters more than CT. Thank God for the electoral college!
It’s more a question of knowing when to unplug yourself on things that are affecting you but that you cannot control. From government news to something bad happening miles from you. These news can affect you but you have no control over the situation. Not doing so is actually one way to get depression.
Not sure you can “unplug” from things that affect you that you cannot control? Sooner or later you’ll have to deal with that issue. I do think you can “unplug” from things that do not affect you that you cannot control.
For instance, if you’re an immigrant, and ICE is rounding up immigrants in your neighborhood, you can go ahead and mentally “unplug” as you like. But you’re going to have to deal with the reality of your situation when you get to the immigration detainment facility. And if you’re actively dealing with that reality, are you really “unplugged”?
At the same time, whether or not Trump turns the white house into a cage match spectacle for his birthday, I mean, it won’t really affect most people. So I would think that’s a lot easier to “unplug” from since it’s not affecting you.
You unplug yourself from media and social media. And maybe open the news paper of your town if you want to spice up your life. The rest you will probably hear all about it anyway from families or colleagues if it’s something big. We are in the era of over connections. We need to know how to unplug. It doesn’t have to be as extreme as u said but if someone is as much as affected like this, this person definitely needs a huge break.
For ICE it’s kinda a big stretch can we agree? And in this case the person does have control. This person does have agency over the issue and should regularize their situation as soon as possible.
An alarming number of people seem to build their intuition about the world from fictional sources, without even realizing it. Movies, tv, books if you're lucky, and now social media all warp the least experienced people's sense of reality. If you watch the old clip shows of home videos, one recurring theme is that people got their intuition about physics from tv or movies. They'd make ramps for their bikes that were laughable and then take a header. They'd jump off roofs onto yoga balls and break their backs.
I think we're seeing a much greater extension of that as people increasingly engage with the world through the lens of media and stories we tell, rather than... you know... doing things.
I’m not normally one for doom and gloom, everything is getting worse kind of thinking. However, one observation from the past few years in particular is exactly that thing, a specific kind of faulty media literacy.
Someone will read Lord of the Flies, for example, and come to the conclusion that it says something real about human nature. No dude, it’s just a story. Someone made it up. It’s not real. It can be interesting and insightful, even a useful mental framework or thought experiment, but it’s not proof or evidence at all! But I increasingly see people treat fiction as if it’s real things that actually happened, and that worries me.
>An alarming number of people seem to build their intuition about the world from fictional sources, without even realizing it.
A friend of mine had a machete that they destroyed when they took a mighty swing at a tiny tree. You could put your hand around this tree but still, do you expect to chop through a baseball bat with your sword like Conan the Barbarian? Too many films depict unrealistic swordplay.
> You could put your hand around this tree
To be fair, that's entirely reasonable to cut down with a machete. There's a bit of a technique to it and it'll take more than one swing but if you don't have a chainsaw handy a good machete will do the job.
>it'll take more than one swing
That’s the crux of this story. There is an expectation that, if you can chop something down in several swings, then one really big swing will do it, right? No. They don’t make machetes and swords like that, and also you are drastically underestimating the force required, or overestimating your strength, or both.
And don't forget that those fictional sources are typically commissioned by oligarchs with their own vested interest in herding the voting masses
So well put!
Another problem is misunderstanding incentives. People think that, if fish protection should be a goal of society, any fish protection law is a good one. Not many can think through second order effects, the drag of regulations on pro-safety innovation, the impact of foreign jurisdictions that don't have this law (or only pretend to follow it for their own gain).
And before the question of trade offs there is the question "does the Fish Protection Act actually protect fish at all?" In a very large number of cases it does not.
I've felt for a long time that laws should have an attached "intent" section and one function of the courts should be to invalidate laws which, after a period of being in place and some analysis, fail to achieve their stated intent.
I think it would be good for democracy if lawmakers had to put in writing what the law is supposed to accomplish AND if that were something legally binding.
This option is what Indians in India largely use, and it is no exaggeration to say it has spelled disaster to the society. Don't believe me? Come to India, and walk through how people live in any random place.
Tolerance is just another word for complacency. I would much rather prefer a brutally progressive system like that of China or Singapore than a society suspended in perpetual lethargy.
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Beter wording: your brain is made for detecting dangers and attention grabbers are taking advantage of that
This is probably it. It's addictive due to hardwiring in the brain, just like sugar.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Back in 2010 I gave a TEDx talk about how the internet can be an extension of your mind.
Nowadays I feel like it is contributing noise. The internet has become X, Reddit, AI, doomscrolling and group messaging.
Very little room for positive messaging. I don’t mean to harp about the theft of attention: the message itself is just not even contributing anything.
Out of interest what is the path to talking at a TEDx?
since they are privately organized, you need to know the organizers or somebody who knows them. Be expert in the topic in question.
On reddit i have seen multiple threads that are positive through and through with topics like, "What are you up to today?", "I just finished school and starting to work", "I am lonely and feel dreadful". I read the comments and was met with level-headed and honest comments/interactions.
As in reality it's important to have walled gardens where people can utter opinions and voice their distress or just say that they are happy. Without getting lynched. These global silos of social media is nothing but deserts where the only way of getting through the noice with any means neccessary.
I have noticed that the same amount of people down voted as up voted the comment. I wonder how they reasoned.
"There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about. Well, we have to end apartheid, for one, slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people."
- Patrick Bateman (as adapted by Mary Heron)
Neil Postman called this the “Peekaboo World”.
“What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.”
https://www.nateliason.com/notes/amusing-death-neil-postman
Postman wrote this in context of television, which is a broadcast channel with no means to interact with it. But in times of social media, your reaction to the news is something you can broadcast yourself, at the very least to your online followers (if we are talking about story feeds). Now, a lot of groups enforce their members to take political stances and show action as a sign of belonging. These might be anything from a writing circle to a raver collective. Everyone already shares the group opinions (sincerely or not), but then they need to perform token activism to maintain their image as a "safe" person to have in the group. Examples of such actions I've seen recently would be:
- A special edition of a writing workshop dedicated to writing poems which can be used by people protesting against the ICE in the US. We are thousands of kilometers away from the US, by the way.
- A street protest against whatever the most recent armed conflict is. The protest has a DJ, a great sound system and everyone is just dancing while singing the slogans.
- A charity party collecting donations for a very narrowly defined vulnerable population in a war-torn area, most often someone the participants can personally identify with.
Case in point is that the vast majority of the population has no power to drive any meaningful change, as Postman rightly noticed. But then, the new source of mental load comes from the fact that you have to be performatively concerned if you don't want to lose your status in a group.
I feel this is somehow reducing all expression of opinion as performative, i.e. serving to heighten the social standing of the expressor. I have a handful of other motivations:
The activism against “performative” activism is equally grating when it misfires, and the movement probably hasn’t even reached its zenith yet.While others might be like that, the type I'm talking about explicitly does not want to be challenged or alter their worldview. I find a comparison with religion an another poster made to be pretty fair, as the people I know who practice such behavior tend to be either insincere (they don't actually care about politics, but just want to control others) or sincere, but unprepared (they didn't care before, so their ability to form political opinions is still developing).
Note that I'm not claiming that this is the only way people interact with media nowadays. Change can happen if people become mobilized; but the phenomenon I'm describing is the pressure to take any action (token or real) on every single issue the group is supposed to be concerned about.
Yes but I’d just want to point out that the rub lies in who is deciding which activism is performative and which is authentic. I.e. all of my friends are authentic, all my enemies are performative.
It is mentally exhausting to stay abreast of all issues that humanity faces, no doubt. I’ll agree with you there. But it doesn’t take much energy for me to say, “man what’s happening in Sudan is messed up.”
Your first paragraph sounds like a religion.
As an autistic person this has never made sense, the things people are willing to do in order to fit into a group, like at it's extreme murdering others. After becoming aware of my diagnosis I've started studying "normal" people and it's insane what you are willing to withstand just to belong to a group or in society. Now I think that some things "normal" people participate in they think is actually fun, like hanging around others doing nothing productive, which after reaching 40 years old, and having a burnout, I also now enjoy just hanging around and belonging to a group. Also social capital, or belonging to a group, has many positive advantages.
> the things people are willing to do in order to fit into a group
Given our evolutionary history as social animals, this is expected. The genes (and memes, in the Dawkinsian sense of the word) for alienating oneself from the tribe and going solo were less successful than the those for remaining in the tribe. We can reasonably expect such adaptations to include sucking up to alphas to avoid being banished from the tribe, being distressed when outside a group, and feeling good when in a group.
Hate to tell you, there's no such thing as "normal". Other people aren't some monolithic group that think one way.
I don't get it, so do you think "hanging around" is fun or not?
Neurotypical is the word you're looking for, not "normal".
"normal" is a perfectly fine word and there's no reason to criticize someone for using it.
It would be somewhat ironic in this context to be policing the use of normal.
I also would acknowledge the intent of offering neurotypical as an alternative might be kind.
However I also agree "normal" works quite well. It is especially distinguished by the quotes as "normal" and subjective, not normatively valued.
What's normal?
It's a math term whose meaning depends on the qualities of the other people around you, not a reference to any one particular set of characteristics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution
"Neurotypical" is the more current and precise term when discussing human behavior, cognition, or neurodevelopment. "Normal" is vague, value-loaded, and scientifically weaker because it implies that neurodivergent people are abnormal rather than simply different. In this context, "neurotypical" is clearer language.
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My favorite is when people are selectively upvote/downvoting a long nested line of argument but fail to notice that the sides "swap" at some point and the voters fail to notice.
Speaks volumes about the community IMO.
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As opposed to treating fact-free rehashings of Israeli state propaganda as 'non-flattering statements' and decorating such treatments with thought-terminating epithets.
I included specific examples from the latest Iran discussion. Flagging responses dead like that is even more thought-terminating than my poor computer geek writing style.
Please respond to those examples in context/a substantive/HN worthy way and have a discussion, not a fact free handwaving of 'they're XYZ evil foreign power's propaganda'. How do the examples I provided break Hacker News guidelines and deserve not only a downvote but to be actively flagged dead? This is a discussion site, not a popularity site. Flagged is not supposed to be used to shape the discussion, but for severe violations of HN guidelines, which the examples do not rise to. The proper response is a response.
It's not a fact-free handwaving; every last one of those comments is just steelmanning Israel's position without any evidential basis. And if you are so deeply concerned about characterizing them as 'XYZ evil foreign power's propaganda', I wonder why you see no reason to push back on claims like this:
>Iran isn’t negotiating in good faith, and will likely need another round of attacks. America should also flood Iran with small arms for the revolutionaries
What kind of productive discussion do you think this encourages? And given that the intelligence community broadly considers the latter a losing proposition, are we to assume that you think they are all Iranian proxies?
> the “Peekaboo World”
What a great analogy. And IG/Tiktok reduce it into an even purer state - endless random videos, barely if at all connected, ephemeral stimulation you can't even remember 30 seconds after seeing it.
I know 50 year old adults who can spend entire hours just in this mesmerized state of flicking through these random feeds, seeing but not seeing, like some kind of drug induced hypnosis. I wonder what Postman would write today, were he still with us.
> … ephemeral stimulation you can't even remember 30 seconds after seeing it. I know 50 year old adults who can spend entire hours just in this mesmerized state of flicking through these random feeds, seeing but not seeing, like some kind of drug induced hypnosis
To be fair, most people who engage in "healthy" habits like reading, creating, meditating, socializing, or just sitting and staring at nature, could also said to be in a mesmerized almost-hypnotized state, and rarely remember much of what they're experiencing.
You can read what his son has written on the subject
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-oursel...
> inflation, crime and unemployment?
Here's a subject I want to explore; the statistical vs individual view of the world. Because those things do matter - to the individuals they happen to. People care about the price level every time they get paid or go grocery shopping. People care if a crime is committed against them - it can be a lifelong trauma. And so on.
They're also likely to care when things happen to their immediate social circle. What about their broader community? However that is defined?
On the other end of that, the ability to do something about things: isn't that ultimately why people value democracy, because it is actually possible to change things, even sometimes for the better?
I plan to be informed about causality and effect - and im voting accordingly to put an end to causes that affect me negatively. So understanding something, not mythologizing or idealizing anything, is a absolutly necessary pre-requisit to voting.
I don't disagree.
Mental health is important as well.
I am informed well enough to vote (when there are two parties) with just a few minutes of the news every day. (And in fact the few minutes seems to have only served to bolster how I was already inclined to vote. One thing I have to say about these times: there is very little nuance.)
For many it probably has a negative effect on their life and their single vote is unlikely to ever make a difference.
Plus people watching the media don’t consume in some objective fashion. Almost everyone just gets stuck in an echo chamber which reinforces reinforces their view rather than making them more informed. They might actually be less informed.
There has never been a vote with any impact on the CIA whatsoever.
Ah, that mighty CIA- that couldnt even stop Trump from tanking the sales of the MIC. Its not real- never was. Its some drunken station-chiefs, rainmaking Langley from hotel bars abroad.
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Er... I got an electric car does that count? Based on $ keeping the old car is cheaper. Also divestment, purchase choices, charity donations, solar install.
Buying electric cars, installing solar, and switching to heat pumps are one of the few things you can materially do to screw the powers that be. The the other one is limiting your family size.
Limiting your family size is a lazy, short term solution.
Having a bigger family and teaching them the right values is a much stronger and long term approach.
In a world where the brightest minds are paid to intentionally develop tools to make people betray their values (advertising, propaganda, rolling news, etc), I'm not sure anyone should feel safe about what they teach their kids. Many industries, but especially tech, will do everything possible to make them do whatever makes a few dozen people richer.
The best thing an individual can do against, say, the advertising industry, is to become an important person in an advertising marketplace and then destroy it. You spend 30 years to become CTO at Google and then you set the billing system to charge every customer $1,000,000, right before you drop an EMP in the biggest DC.
Limiting your family size has concrete outcomes, having a big family and hoping you can impart the right values so they go onto have an positive impact is no guaranteed. You can hope your child goes onto develop a fusion reactor that fits in a storage container but the likelyhood is they won't be.
In my opinion it's a way to justify your own (perfectly fine) selfish desire to have a child.
Large family sizes dilute family wealth and leave children at a disadvantage to their better capitalized peers.
The only thing you can do to hurt the powers that be is not buying.
Can be done too. I live in a rather big city, so I don't own a car, as I can perfectly go by using public transport.
Only if you limit your work and social life to that particular city. Not something most people want to do.
There are many places in the world this is not true. I would say about half the people I know who live in London don’t own a car. They travel plenty - probably more than the people I know who don’t live in London. If they really need a car once they get to their destination they will rent one, or use taxis.
For The Netherlands you are really constricted to the city you live in if you don’t own a car. You can forget about going to a concert, a birthday party or catching an early flight without one. Or if you want to do anything fun on a Sunday in the east. Most people I know have a social life or do sports that require a car. If your children play football you really need a car. Last time I used a taxi in The Netherlands it was €210 for a 40 minute ride, that is reserved for the very wealthy.
London is a well connected metropole with 15 million people, not really comparable to most cities.
Edit, reply to Alex as I am rate limited with my comments:
Please tell me how I can cycle the 60 kilometers from the airport to my home at 23:00 with a rolling carry-on suitcase.
Renting a car is around €50 for a night out. And you need to reserve way in advance which is not great for spontaneous trips. Car ownership becomes cheaper and more convenient very quickly. I did car renting and after a couple of €1000/month bills I went back to car ownership.
Renting a bus for the sports team is a lot more expensive than using the parents cars which are at no cost to the club.
Reply to consp: You need the cars for football matches as public transport doesn’t get you there. The fields are outside of cities and matches are in the weekend when public transport is very limited.
> in The Netherlands it was €210 for a 40 minute ride
That's much more than taxis cost in the UK, and pretty expensive even for the Netherlands. You have great cycling infrastructure, and public transport though.
Renting a car is an affordable alternative to ownership, if you need to go to occasional concerts or birthday parties, and public transport happens to be inconvenient for your specific destination. I did that for years - the rental company would deliver and collect from my workplace, so it's super-easy.
> If your children play football you really need a car.
A friend of mine used to ferry his son 1000s of km per year to ice-hockey matches around the country, so I know what you mean. I don't understand it though - if the whole team is travelling, why don't they just rent a bus? Personally, I don't think it's healthy for a child's hobby to consume so much of the parents' time - of course, your choice.
You can forget about going to a concert [..] or catching an early flight without one
Those are really bad examples. Quite a lot of venues are easier to reach by public transport than by car, e.g. Carré, Luxor, Tivoli, Diligentia, Vera; even Pinkpop provides a dedicated shuttle service. And Schiphol has 24h train service, nobody cycles to the airport unless they work there.
Schiphol has 24 hours train service that reaches maybe 10-15 percent of the Dutch population. If your flight lands past 23:00 chances are slim you are going home by train.
Same goes for concerts that end after 22:00. You need private transport to get you home if you are in the 80% of the population that doesn’t have public transit late in the evening and night (or Sundays)
Doesn't everyone bike everywhere in the Netherlands?
No. Only short trips to the supermarket and such. Most of the trips are done by car.
Most cities in The Netherlands aren’t high density and the Dutch are king of urban sprawl hence the high amount of bicycles. In other European cities with better planning people walk instead.
He obviously was talking about long distance trips, not just daily grocery shopping to the nearest supermarket.
You don't need a car for football matches. You need a car for convenience because [fill lazy reason]. And if one person rents a van you can take half the team...
Depends on the public transport network where you live. I used to work with someone who commuted from London to Cambridge (yes, that way around). And in Berlin, someone else who commuted from half way to Poland.
Won't work everywhere, e.g. from what I saw when visiting I don't foresee US cities rapidly integrating enough good public transport to properly replace cars within themselves, and from what I've heard about how municipal organisation works in the US even less so for a convenient and well integrated intercity network, but it can be done.
halfway from Berlin to Poland is like a 30 minute ride on regional train. It's quite close to the border.
It's also 100 km to the border. The point is, we actually have trains (and busses) that can do this here. It's actually possible.
I visited Davis CA few times around a decade ago for comparison; Go to google maps, choose public transit, and use Davis as an origin or destination while dragging the other end around and see how many routes it can even find.
The rate of successes I get in the Sacramento conurbation are about the same as the rate of success I get for rural Brandenburg, but for most of the rest central Valley (with a handful of exceptions), Google mostly couldn't find a route at all.
By this measure, California's central valley is worse-connected for long-distance public transport even than rural Wales (measured by "can I route-find to Aberystwyth?").
You can use public transportation, bikes, car pooling, taxis and rentals for your rare-use needs, and its usually cheaper than owning and operating a vehicle.
I'd say that the vast majority of people who live in a city both work, and socialise almost exclusively there.
Unfortunately not. Average distance to work is 19,9 kilometers. That is well outside the city they live in. Most people can’t afford to live in the city they work in. In Amsterdam my entire team lived outside the city.
Unless they lived in another big city, this is completely off-topic. Suburbs tend to have hit-or-miss public transit access, and the vast majority of people who live in a big city work in that big city (20 kilometers away would usually be just another district within the same city).
I don't. Long distance trains exist too, and I can watch a movie or eat at a restaurant car there rather than focus on the road.
My favorite is having beer with friends in a restaurant car. It's like going to a pub but with awesome view!
There are things that could hurt them a lot more than ignoring them.
You're being coy.
Perhaps someone should clarify though that most of us are looking for legal means to rattle the shackles of our (Tr/B)illionaire overlords.
Legally, you can do a lot more than ignoring. If you have any talent for it, becoming an activist (say a youtuber) rallying people against whatever you believe is bad, can be pretty powerful. A single person (again, with some talent for public speaking etc.) has a real chance of making meaningful change this way.
Rallying people to do what? Boycotts? They have some effect, but never enough. The most influential YouTuber I can think of is Louis Rossmann, and you know, he's not a YouTuber, he's a MacBook repair guy who took up YouTube.
No, not boycotts.
The influencial youtubers I think of actually can shape political debate and thus policy - what they say, if it gains enough popularity, sometimes seeps into the political agenda of the ruling party (which is always looking to "score points" with the voters and has its ears to the ground listening which issues and points people are currently responding to). It's basically like being a columnist of an influential newspaper, except you don't need to have the right connections to become one.
The political establishment is savvy enough to score points on things they don't care about and ignore voters on things they do care about. That's why one party supports LGBTQ pride and the other opposes it, but they both support the genocide. LGBTQ pride doesn't really affect politicians' power, genocide does.
Depends on which powers for each specific choice.
Electric cars don't run on Saudi-Trump-Putin juice, so they're pretty good step in screwing those, for example.
The difference between solar+batteries and oil and gas is the former is a durable good and latter are consumables.
I think producing and consuming like crazy could also work, considering how quickly Twitter turned Elon Musk from most important to least interesting figure on Earth. Wealth and sensory capacity don't appear to be positively correlated at all.
The real eco hippies were fueling a 40 year old mercedes on fry oil. Powers that be want you to replace all sources of oil dependent product with another oil dependent product (after all, EVs depend on oil making plastic and grease a cheap commodity). They don’t want you to buy something they already sold to the unwashed masses decades ago. They want you to buy new thing. Never mind old thing still works.
Buy a used EV, best of both worlds.
No, it doesn't. Your contribution is statistically insignificant. It was purely a symbolic gesture.
Everyone's contribution is insignificant, and yet it all adds up.
This is rather like saying the average player in a football match scores 0 goals, therefore 0 goals were scored.
No, it’s like saying how many goals you personally score is insignificant for how many goals are scored in total in football matches worldwide.
It’s like Down’s paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting). Being a paradox doesn’t make it untrue.
Even so, an electric car is not particularly good for the environment.
Bicycles and public transportation.
Bicycles and public transportation are better yes. If I were healthy enough I would consider a cargo bike and bring 20kg of shopping home on that (for real). It would be cool. Then buses for unladen journeys.
If the cargo bike is electric, the threshold for healthy enough lowers significantly.
My weekly shopping for a family of four is done on one like that, which I can park like 50cm away from the shop door and 50cm away from my home front door. That’s even more convenient than any car.
I hope you understand that you are in a very privileged position to be able to afford that lifestyle. Not everyone can do that.
Yes, we should, collectively, all demand this.
It's the nice thing about government in my opinion: we create it to serve us as a community. Our taxes are the price to creating the community we want to live in. From taking trash away to keep the neighborhoods clean, to good schools to educate our (and other's) children.
If we want public transportation, a bike-able city—we just need to demand our tax money go to that.
Are you claiming owning a cargo bike is a bigger privilege than owning a car? Problem with cargo bikes are, if you are living in a flat where you cannot "park" them, you mean this?
The lifestyle I refer to is living in a bike friendly city, being able to afford a multi-thousand euro cargo bike and having secure storage for it. OP also appears to live in a house with a yard on top of that. That lifestyle is reserved for very high earners.
Edit, reply to Lukan as I am rate limited with my comments: I’m sure that those people you saw in Leipzig and Berlin are global 5% earners, maybe even 1%-ers. That is a very luxurious lifestyle that not many can achieve.
Edit 2, again to Lukan. My point still stands that the Germany lifestyle is very luxurious compared to the rest of the world. And even in Germany, you need a decent income if you want to live in a high density city.
"Edit, reply to Lukan as I am rate limited with my comments: I’m sure that those people you saw in Leipzig and Berlin are global 5% earners, maybe even 1%-ers. That is a very luxurious lifestyle that not many can achieve."
I am pretty sure they are not, I don't just see them, but also speak with them. But normal approach is not compare "global 5% earners", as probably all of germany would fall into that bucket, but compare locally. So can a normal german household afford them?
And the answer is yes. But if the household also needs a SUV and a garage for that, then maybe not.
But I was talking about people who cannot afford their own house. And they could afford a cheap car - or a cargo bike.
"Edit 2, again to Lukan. My point still stands that the Germany lifestyle is very luxurious compared to the rest of the world."
I never debated that.
"And even in Germany, you need a decent income if you want to live in a high density city."
But this is not correct. You can get a 4 room apartment in Leipzig for 750 € a month (but of course you won't be the only one applying).
Also you may want to email dang about your rate limitation. Your recent comments seem fine enough to me to fix that.
Rate limits, once applied, are almost never removed.
Indeed, I’ll make a new account. Typically burn through them in a couple of months.
Hm. Maybe visit a city like Leipzig or Berlin? Lot's of cargo bikes - some do belong to high earners, but most do not. Finding a suitable place to rent with secure storage is hard, but most old houses for example do have a big enough entrance house floor, where the bike can stand and this is what people do. Otherwise bike sheds in front of the house are becoming standard as well.
im a bit confused.
in poorer places people use more bikes, or just walk.
the car based spots are from wealth, and many had bicycle friendly infrastructure that was torn down to build super highways for cars
What??
On what planet is getting your groceries on a bike "more privileged" than driving?
Why 20kg? I could stop by the supermarket every day and get what I can carry in one or two bags.
Yep, you're describing Japan's infamous mamachari: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/シティサイクル
You don’t even need bicycles if you design a city correctly.
Sure but compared to ICE cars they are much better.
This is literally oil industry propaganda.
No it isn’t.
I live in Zürich, I don’t even need a bike, I just take a tram to do my groceries. Many of my friends have bikes though, I’ve considered getting a cheap one but my apartment’s bike storage room is kind of crowded…
That has literally nothing to do with the claim "electric cars are not particularly good for the environment".
yeah, the real carbon footprint of especially non-wimpy EVs remains to be seen. EV recycling seem to be as real as gasoline from algae, the slides look beautiful but all mysteriously fail to take off.
One man's spite against this type of self-satisfied, evidence-free opinion is what got the 27th Amendment passed.[1]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th...
Practically, focusing on the things you can change (mostly small scale evils in your community) will have the highest degree of positive effect, rather than focusing on stuff you are bombarded with online that is out of your control (mostly large scale evils).
However, don't think you get vindicated from duty just because the task is impossible. You are as just as much responsible for yourself, your family, your friends, your community, as you are responsible for the person living on the other side of the globe. Whatever you decide to do with that information is up to you, but you will suffer with any of those who suffer, whether that be in life or death. Only the delusional think they can escape righteous judgment.
If you do that the system works around you.
Pretty much all the power of state/local politics has been usurped by fed/state via "in order to get your own people's money back as grants you shall pass a law meeting requirements blah, blah, blah...." type rules. You can want to improve permitting rules or the local school district's priorities all you want but the system is built to prevent you from being able to do so except in the most limited "within the permitted amount of local deviation from the federal norm" way.
Helping one's community encompasses much more than just the political realm.
Righteous judgment according to which set of beliefs? Only the delusional are certain about anything that happens in the afterlife.
I have always thought of this as a "broken superman." Superman has super-hearing that allows him to hear anyone asking for help anywhere in the world. Super-speed to get there in an instant. And super-strength to solve all the problems.
Media only gives you super-hearing.
It's not that you plan to do nothing; rather, it's because you can do nothing about them. The only people who have any sway are the various foreign offices and the country leaders. But even their power is incredibly limited, because humanity moves like the tide.
Sure, Trump can continue chastising Netanyahu for continuing Israel's attacks into Gaza and Lebanon (which will sabotage the already comical agreement between the USA and Iran), but Netanyahu is in a bind with an October election coming up (and a hardliner rival who's already calling him a 3-failed-war-leader), so he can't change course no matter how much Trump (who needs a Republican victory in November) gets pissed off and threatens him. And even those threats will largely be empty because losing the religious right would be catastrophic. And no one else at either helm could do any better.
And because of that, Iran knows it can just continue like it always has, slowly working towards a bomb, with Saudia Arabia and Turkey soon following suit (they can't allow Iran to be the only nuclear power in the region - not with an isolationist USA).
Then we have Russia, whose insecurity and "defensive expansionism" spans centuries, stemming from its geography, so there's simply no way to placate them, and no way for them to ever be happy about NATO (which everyone already knows is a paper tiger anyway - it's just a matter of sussing out where the real alliance lines lay).
So yeah, you're not going to solve it. I'm not going to solve it. Nobody's gonna solve it. We're just gonna ride the tide.
> they can't allow Iran to be the only nuclear power in the region - not with an isolationist USA
isnt that leaving out the current only nuclear power in the region?
Netanyahu could also simply retire, he has been in politics since the 1970s.
But he would probably end up in jail on corruption charges, which is why he perseveres.
At this moment I wonder if the entire region would be better off if the Knesset passed a law "Netanyahu is universally pardoned, but must GTFO of the country and leave politics entirely". Cynical, but maybe the result would be worth it.
On a more positive note, I can see Iran dropping their nuclear program. It is expensive and the same money could be diverted to the drone and missile program, which is what led to them not losing the war.
Meanwhile, Russia has a very extensive and expensive nuclear program, and it didn't help them against Ukrainian drones burning and exploding strategic factories a few kilometers from the Kremlin. The threshold for an actual use of nukes is very high and they are losing a lot of their deterrence value.
I Netanyahu retires, Eisenkot or Bennett take up the mantle, which is arguably worse. But he's got no reason to retire, given how he's polling now.
Iran isn't going to drop their nuclear program. They know full well that IF this deal actually works out (it won't, but just for the sake of argument...), they can go back to their clandestine enrichment program and nobody will actually look very hard (just like before). It'll be a return to normalcy, except they'll also be exacting tolls on the strait and building up with that new fat wad of free cash. And if it doesn't work out, they just stand firm until the USA gets tired and goes home with a fig leaf "we won" as November nears. Either way, similar result.
Russia is going to lose this war in a slow and grinding attrition that will smack of Afghanistan, that's not in question. But their ambitions aren't going to die. When they're ready again a decade later (and if NATO is still a thing), they'll grab a chunk of NATO land and extend their nuclear umbrella over it, daring the paper tiger to do something.
If you are right about Russia losing the war of attrition (I am not certain, though I certainly hope so), this will result in some internal unrest. The Muslim part of the Caucasus may well secede, places like Dagestan have negligible ethnic Russian population anyway. The next leader will have a lot of work on his hands just to keep the federation intact and Russian politics at least a bit independent on China.
Ultimately, a younger Russian leader who does not live in the past like Putin does may realize that Russia now has fewer people than Bangladesh or Indonesia and cannot afford old-style wars of conquest anymore.
Russia has extended a surveillance pantopticon over the North Caucasus with Chinese tech and disarmed its population. Local ethnic elites and their families have grown rich through relationships with Moscow and only stand to lose all those luxuries through separatism. I don't believe that those republics breaking away is as likely as one would have thought in the early millennium.
> Eisenkot or Bennett take up the mantle, which is arguably worse.
As far as I'm aware there is no reason to believe so
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/art...
I think the question was "in what sense are Eisenkot and Bennett worse"?
I remember Bennett's shuttle diplomacy between Russia in Ukraine in 2022 and he struck me like a person who values peace more than Netanyahu does.
I meant the worse part
> "Netanyahu is universally pardoned, but must GTFO of the country and leave politics entirely"
Such an option was offered to him and was refused.
The drones and missiles helped them to not lose the war, but they were significantly damaged by the initial strikes. A nuclear capability might have been sufficient deterrent to prevent those.
It also might not. Nuclear powers have lost a lot of "smaller wars" since 1945. Given that most wars are of the smaller variety, and that the threshold of nuke use is very high, it makes sense to think of the economy of the entire arsenal. Especially if your national economy is on the weaker side.
Too many people looked at Gaddafi's fall and Kim's endurance and made a short generalization "it pays to have nukes". But there is nuance in that contrast - if Libya was a friend of China and directly bordered it, no one would dare attack it the way it was attacked, nukes or not.
Iran's largest leverage is in controlling Hormuz and threatening Dubai, Qatar etc. with destruction of their oil and water infrastructure. All of this can be done cheaply with conventional weapons. If they ever use nukes, though, they can expect to be nuked in response.
There is no amount of nuclear capability that can stop a party you are major threat to from attacking you. See Hamas attacking Israel. Of course Iran will still enrich uranium because they are an excellent negotition leverage.
I think if Washington and Mar-a-Lago got nuked it might stop attacks?
Trump has already tried to use the US' nuclear arsenal, which (according to accounts) caused the Chief of Staff to evict him from the situation room. I don't think nuking US soil (however dirty it already is) will tip the scales in Iran's favour.
Trump could literally just stop sending billions of taxpayer dollars to Netanyahu and the war would end - probably not well for Netanyahu. He could use that fact as leverage. He isn't.
It’s not that easy the money is going to the US arms companies. So he would have to stop giving his donors and mates money.
I actually am spending some of my money in an attempt to contribute to decrease some of these things, and investing bit parts of my retirement plans in others.
So, not entirely nothing.
This is close to correct. We should be aware of current events but not become too emotionally involved with them. They are mostly outside of our control, and we need to reserve most of our focus and emotional energy on what is front of us and our loved ones. However, we should still act on behalf of greater causes with the means at our disposal. Some examples...
world in crisis - I donate to World Central Kitchen
the war in Ukraine - I donate to Come Back Alive
fascism in America - I vote for and donate to the campaigns of candidates opposed to fascism
"We should be aware of current events" - should we? Why? There is an avalanche of current events, I've stopped paying attention and I still find out - its impossible to avoid, I see absolutely no value in paying attention to things that I'm just not interested in. War in Iran - yep, battle of the stupids - it just doesn't matter, there is nothing I can do about it, best to ignore it all. I have friends obsessed with the news, wake up in the morning and watch the news during breakfast - they discuss it endlessly, get a lot of angst from it, its all just noise to my mind.
Cause people unaware of those events vote to cause those events.
Doing what you feel necessary or useful at a local scale is still empowering. Understanding that the effects will be mostly local as well is a good thing, but choosing your battles is perfectly healthy.
Large groups of people all contributing small amounts towards a goal none of them could accomplish on their own is the only way any of those things ever get done.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with watching the news though, I would put it paying attention to the news actually takes time from things you could do.
News is what people who do things use to maintain an accurate mental model of the world.
If everything that you know about the world fits in a 2km radius around your house, you aren't doing anything.
Thank you for your donations. World Central Kitchen is a really unique organization. In addition to feeding people in Ukraine, Gaza, and pretty much anywhere in the world where disaster strikes, they have a very unique model in which they employ locals and feed cash into in local businesses, generating economic impact to jumpstart the shattered economies in disaster zones. Your donations actually make a bigger difference than you might realize.
I was recently massively downvoted on Reddit because I mentioned I didn’t really care about candidates stances either way on Israel/Palestine as it regards to a city-level election. I certainly have opinions and understand why folks have principles either way, but we can’t make every issue the issue we spend our energy on, and this doesn’t meet the bar for me for a city official.
Sometimes online and election media discourse can feel like we’re supposed to be single issue voters on 1000 issues at once.
Israel Palestine single-voterism is particularly frustrating to me because of the weird way it has to infect completely irrelevant topics. As a particularly crazy example, I remember people arguing about Israel Palestine in the context of the Australian Aboriginal Voice to Parliament debate, a debate about an internal representation mechanism for Australian Aboriginal people, incredibly few of which have any ties to either Israel or Palestine, and a group which I considerably doubt represent a single soldier on either side.
Given the shift in attitudes among the public and especially the Democratic voter base, a candidate’s willingness to go against Israel is a superb proxy for whether they will prioritize voters over donor interests.
It’s also effectively a referendum on the current Iran mess, gas prices, assaults on free speech by the administration, and the Democratic establishment in general (AIPAC is the #1 single-issue lobby by far).
That’s a feature, not a bug.
Historically that tactic is used by ‘revolutionary’ and ‘liberation’ and reactionary groups to overwhelm and exclude honest debate. It’s a destabilization technique, aimed at gathering critical mass for revolt with no clear second phase. Occupy, overthrow, liberate, replace…
Taken at face value, honest protest, it’s a hate crime against the victims and participants in the actual situation: these chaos agitators steal the cause for noise and invest in perpetual purity and polemic campaigns, it only hurts the victims, but enables eternal grievance politics for the agitators.
Spray painting Nazi slogans on American universities isn’t helping diplomacy half the world away. Flotillas without aide aren’t aide.
The propagandists involved are not dumb, they are funding very tactically. The point is not convincing or helping anyone, it’s establishing political dominance and orthodoxy. Mob rule.
> Flotillas without aide aren't aide.
Is this referring to the flotilla full of food sailing towards Gaza that was invaded and kidnapped by Israeli pirates inside the national waters of Greece?
I think it's used as a stalking horse by outsiders who are really just trying to put across the idea 'candidate X sucks and you should shun them like they're poison'. I don't think that topic is treated like it's authentic at all. It's used just to make people mad by influencers who don't give a rat's ass about Palestine really.
We have the same problem in the UK. Local councils went all in on the Palestine thing when their job is basically collecting trash, roadworks, planning and education.
I can’t realistically vote a candidate in who doesn’t talk about trash collection but does talk about Middle Eastern politics.
Sounds like all the noise in Texas right now about sharia law. Muslims are a tiny proportion of the people there, what are the politician all worked up about?
Yeah we have that too. The right wing are using it to leverage voters here.
In my ideal world, explaining this stance would be a part of democracy.
It’s an uphill battle vs a tribal mentality, though.
If I lived in 1930 I would definitely care about a city candidate's stances on Germany/Judaism. Even though that candidate couldn't do anything to affect the Germany/Judaism situation, it would still tell me a lot about that candidate.
theres some reason to care - non-federal entities still make and enforce anti-bds laws, and put support for israel into contracts for working with them.
if you want to be able to have say, cheaper government, you need to be elect local officials on the palestine side, so that folks other than just the pro-israel ones can bid
That’s assuming that the antisemites are cheaper.
But a company boycotting others for political/religious agendas is not going to be able to provide the cheapest/best service, it’s therefore not optimal to go with companies that practice BDS.
[flagged]
>We should be aware of current events
I have come to the conclusion that there is no way a layman understand the truth about current events. So it is best to not at all be aware of any current events as reported by the media or popular opinion.
For example you say "fascism in America", and I wonder is this guy for real? Fascism? If this was true how are all the people who insult Trump on social media still alive or not locked up?
So imagine if you were running a new outlet. All of your readers will unquestioningly accept your flawed narrative! And imagine there are multiple of such flawed/biased news outlets.
There is no way to know the truth. This is painfully clear when you read stuff in the news that you have first hand knowledge about...There is some name to the fallacy of why people still believe in news despite that...
If there’s no way to know the truth, how do you know you’ve come to the right conclusion?
What conclusion? I am talking about not having any conclusions at all.
> *I have come to the conclusion* that there is no way a layman understand the truth about current events. So it is best to not at all be aware of any current events as reported by the media or popular opinion.
That is a conclusion that is arrived over course over long time and many experiences/thought. It is not a news or blog article I read once and made me conclude it.
Have you considered that maybe most of the posters on this website weren't born yesterday and have also spent a lifetime absorbing facts from many sources and experiences?
In fact most people have, in some way.
Most of the posters in this website are teenagers or in their early twenties. Let’s not be delusional here, this is still the internet.
There may have been a time when most people on the Internet were in their teens and early twenties, but I don't think that has been true for a long time.
I think it's still the case, especially during summer. People get busy and less interested in online bs once they graduate high school or college. I've noticed, someone mentions their age here and it skews younger pretty often.
I don't believe you've made a case here.
But what is your point? Can't one come to a world view that is vastly different from his contemporaries?
I think he means the conclusion you were talking about when you said "I have come to the conclusion..."
You concluded that America is not fascist.
I did not. I meant that even in the news, there is nothing to substantiate such a point of view.
Then you clearly think it is not.
ie null finding versus negative finding
Neither are a positive finding.
So you don't know whether America is fascist or not? Because you clearly presented it as if you believe America is not fascist.
Is not instant. But if trump stays in power he’d pack the courts(not that he listens to the courts anyway), put people in power that would just do what he says and he would start locking people up the instant he could. It certainly is a slow walk to fasicism
> how are all the people who insult Trump on social media still alive or not locked up
I think you'll find that some of them actually are locked up, and a few of them are dead.
So it can't be fascism or be close it it until we have fully operational death camps?
Fascism is a way overused term. Personally I tend to avoid it unless we're seeing paramilitary forces shooting civilians in the face. Other people may have lower thresholds.
What about shooting them in the chest while they drive their car? Or shooting them in the back after they’ve been detained?
No further explanations should be necessary.
Did you know Hitler was the president of Germany for about ten years before he started the holocaust?
Was he a fascist during that time?
> ? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployme
A proletarian revolution would be a good start, not sure what this ideologue writer was on about. History is far from having ended, change can still happen through the union of individual wills.
But how do you start a proletarian revolution?
It's all well and good to say "this collective action would change the bad status quo", but even if you're 100% correct, unless you can point to ways to work toward said collective action, it's still pretty useless. You're not actually helping to change the bad status quo.
History shows that a revolution can only be started by a group of potential elites who hope to displace the current elites.
This is a weird quote. It reeks of pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things. The media influenced how Americans voted in the US election, and they voted for a guy that predictably started a major new war in the Middle East. That is a real thing that happened and has impacted billions of people globally with second-order economic effects. Is anything short of each individual American taking up arms and marching to Iran "doing nothing"?
> People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things
People don't do that.
Politics in US(and democracies in general) have what I call the cable tv bundling problem.
Imagine you have only two bundle packages with your most preferred channels split evenly across two packages along with some unwanted channels. Regardless of which package you choose, you'll miss out on some of your favorite channel and still subscribe to unwanted ones.
You may enjoy watching a channel occassionally at your neighbors who subscribed to the other package but when it is time for renewal, you personally pick the package that gives you maximum bang for your money & preferences.
People will vote mainly based on one or two issues they strongly feel about.
The US is a statistical outlier in almost every single metric. Almost nothing about the US generalizes, not to the world as a whole, and not to other Western countries. Certainly not to functioning liberal democracies.
Value bundling is a pretty universal problem. Maybe Switzerland is less impacted with their direct democracy escape valves, but it's a huge issue in almost every country.
The US has an extreme case of it, with their 2 parties system, but most countries can't keep 4 different issues actively guiding politics.
The US suffers from Duverger's Law which means that any vote for anything other than one of the two big parties is wasted. In my country, we currently have 17 different parties, each with different variations of policies. Some are outliers, but many of them have or have had power to some degree over the years. Your cable-tv problem still exists, but to a much smaller extent.
In this case, one of the packages is uninspiring and the other is fascism, so the choice is fairly clear.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
is he a fascist?
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My take on it is that he's not blaming people for the "doing nothing" part, but rather the fretting part. Of course most Americans can't reasonably do anything beyond vote or throw some dollars or social media sentiment at the thing. One should just take into mind that that is the limit of most people's ability to effect change.
Which is enough to make the rest of the world hold their breath, waiting to see what the sum of little choices will be.
People vote for such a government very rarely - in the US, about once every two years. I don't think anyone would object to you spending a week or even a month before the election learning a large amount about what's wrong in the world. But when you go into the voting booth on November 3 this year, do you expect your choices will be at all influenced by the details of the bad news you read on June 21?
Candidates don't pop up out of nowhere on election day, and building support for either candidates or policies takes time, public debate, raising awareness. All of that is a reason for more political engagement, not less. Given how much power we actually wield to significantly influence how issues are approached in a democracy, we should strive to make more constructive use of the news. There are real, deep-seated problems with both the current media and how people consume it, but we have a civic responsibility to do better rather than disengage, because quite literally the fate of millions of people are influenced by the sum of our actions.
Candidates don't find it difficult to express the most popular opinions in the short time before an election. You really do have to know what they did previously if you want to correctly evaluate them.
It’s not really.
The peekaboo world, elegantly described, gives you enough information or misinformation to make an uninformed decision.
You vote for who you were told to vote for.
It wasn’t predictable that he would start a war.
He presented himself as the anti-war candidate and then betrayed his electorate.
From outside the US, nothing about him has really been predictable, except that he consistently lies about everything.
The only predictable thing about this American presidency is the total chaos that has been inflicted on the world by millions of intellectually degenerate Americans. This is what the world sees. Almost nobody is making excuses for him, everybody is trying to move on without the US.
So yeah, in that sense another war is simultaneously an unpredictable outcome and an unsurprising outcome.
The real question is should you have trusted his manifesto after the last time?
During his first term, his continuous threats to north Korea were enough to force congress to restrict presidential powers (the whole fire and fury stuff), and that's not counting Venezuela, Syria and others.
It was evident to anyone aware and paying attention.
Since January 6th it was clear that he would be willing to secure his power in any way. The most obvious way in america is to start a war.
And even if noone could predict that - the worst part is all the Americans sitting by, twiddling thumbs after seeing Trump making the whole world worse. You are the loudest "democracy" on the planet, but noone demands the necessary accountability from the dear leader. Democracy does not only happen on election day.
He presented himself as someone who has utter disregard for any form of coherence and people actually argued that that's what made him palatable to the masses. I don't think that someone who voted for him can in good faith claim they didn't know he would betray his promises. All they wanted Is for him to own the libs
How many wars and military actions did he start in his first term? How many times did he do the opposite of what he said he did? The specific case is unpredictable, the general pattern isn't.
I agree with this. What was certain and predictable was that Harris was a war candidate (the Democrats presided over the first year of genocide and were intending to continue).
MAGA was going to be bad in some way, but the Democrats were very bad in very known ways, so voting for whoever was at least saying they were against war was the rational decision for anyone who cared about not having genociders at the helm of the state.
To give you the benefit of the doubt at best it would be like 5/10 vs 6/10. There wasn’t ever any difference that Soto’s have ever recruited into any decision. The only reason someone would have thought Harris was a war candidate would have been because rogan or similar said it.
Both Harris and Trump were identical in that respect, so it shouldn't have swayed your decision.
Harris was a known to be bad with respect to the war issue, became very obviously bad when she started campaigning with Liz Cheney. Trump was less known bad, so that difference should certainly have swayed your decision.
Trump had already tried to overthrow the previous election. He could only have been thought less bad if you weren't paying attention.
If you define paying attention as funneling MSNBC straight into your brain 24/7, then sure.
Greater variance, same mean
>MAGA was going to be bad in some way, but the Democrats were very bad in very known ways, so voting for whoever was at least saying they were against war was the rational decision for anyone who cared about not having genociders at the helm of the state.
This implies that Donald Trump/Republicans weren't pro-Zionist and didn't support Israel which is obviously untrue.
The truth is there was no "non-genocide" candidate between the two parties and pretending otherwise - particularly by voting for Trump - was simply self-delusion.
Both sides are against the genocide of Israel, thank God - and against the genocide of Arabs.
(Unlike the meme-puppets who now believe that some genocides are better than other genocides).
If you paid attention to his actions while in office, rather than a selection of his words while on the campaign trail, it was pretty clear he wasn't in the least bit interested in being a "peace president;" he just wanted the Nobel Peace Price because Obama got one.
You'd have trouble finding a candidate who wouldn't predictably start a major war in the middle East. Biden and Trump 1 were kind of exceptions. Kamala certainly seemed pro-war-in-the-middle-East with her support for Israel, so she's out. Who did you vote for instead?
Frankly, bullshit. Harris did not seemed more pro war or aggressive, unless you live in deep conservative bubble.
The slight problem here is that the war was started by Netenyahu, whom US voters are unable to remove. But yes, I doubt Harris would have gone for the decapitation strike that destabilized everything.
netenyahu may have convinced trump tp go to war, but its the US that started the war.
it would be a different case, and very likely a different iranian response if israel had started the war, and the US did its more typical "is nearby and shoots down missiles flying overhead"
Netenyahu has been pushing the "Iran is building a nuke; they're literally a week away" line for decades.
Trump and the day drinker were the first senior US officials to take that seriously - Trump kicked that off by neutering a working and workable international agreement that capped HEU levels and allowed routine inspection and on site monitoring agreement, with more stupidity following.
Harris, and most other "traditional" (non MAGA) candidates typically follow the advice of the core military and intelligence services; it's unlikely any career politician would have jumped into open assault on either alleged drug boats or Iran.
Is Netanyahu now an official representative of the american government?
No, but neither was Musk, yet DOGE happened. Trump isn't just a malignant sadistic narcissist, he's also a vulnerable senior with dementia that others can exploit.
War was started by Trump, Hegseth and Netenyahu. Hegseth specifically wants wars for emotional reasons - it makes him feel good.
America has a lot of Iran hawks, especially in goverment/military circles. They got their way.
See what I mean? America keeps starting wars in the middle east. Go back further in time and it was Obama, then Bush, then a little bit of Clinton, then the other Bush. It doesn't matter who or what party they're in, they mostly end up doing it anyway. No reason to think Harris would be anything different, especially considering her statements of promising military support to Israel.
No I dont see what you mean. You are trying to Harris sound the same as Trump. That is extremely dishonest framing. There is a reason why Israel and pro-Israel Americans went with Trump - because he was giving them a lot more of what they wanted.
Trumps military/war track record so far is a.) Iran war b.) Venezuela kidnapping c.) pro-Russia stance in Ukraine d.) board of peace composed of dictators and murderers e.) regular boatsmen murders f.) trying to steal Greenland. The Harris "refuses to take pro-palestinian side and refuses to abandon Israel entirely, but still not enough for pre-Israel side to accept her" is weak sauce.
We're talking about before his election. What made it predictable that Trump would bomb Iran but Harris wouldn't? Whoever the president is, the forces that make America fight wars seem to keep on successfully pushing them to do it. Both their parties started a lot of wars in the middle east with their previous presidents (Obama and Bush II).
Trump avoided briefings like they were his uglier children, famously first term rumours claimed the intelligence crowd had to dumb down two hour compact briefings to 5 minute cartoon animated toilet reading fodder.
Harris has a background as a prosecutor and has a track record of being literate and processing stacked feet thick piles of paper.
The force pushing to bomb Iran has always been Israel, the counter force has always been detailed backlogs of military exercises that relentlessly conclude that to be a bloody stupid idea.
It was predictable that Harris would take good advice (and perhaps follow that), and equally predictable that Trump would bluster his way forward and ignore the existing weight of experience and prior exercises.
FWiW I would not have predicted that Trump would stick himself into Iran ... I honestly thought he was stupid, just not that stupid. Although the Obama deal was famously one of his weird tic like bugaboos .. correctly factoring in how much room the former POTUS occupied in the Trumple cranium was likely where I failed.
It sounds like you are trying to both-sides away the fact that Trump (or "Trump 2", if you insist) is an outlier here. US support for Israel has been pretty invariant over the years but nobody went along with Bibi's wet dream until now.
On the other hand - you may not choose a whether a president will start a war in the middle east, but Trump's cost was abnormally low compared to his predecessors in one very important area - soldier's coffins coming home. His adventurism may have had substantial financial costs, but is better than Bush or Obama on deaths while in combat.
Trump is unhinged enough to not care about sunk cost fallacy. The deal is still terrible though.
> Middle East, inflation, crime and unemployment, preserving the natural environment, NATO, OPEC, the CIA, Iran
Not voting for republican part or candidates would fix a lot of those things, although I will probably be heavily downvoted for this since cryptobros like their low taxes at all costs.
If you get downvoted it'll be for starting a partisan fight for no reason. That shit is annoying and drags down the discussion.
I won't downvote you , but voting D will not solve any of these problems.
It would be a start. D isn't much better than R, but it is slightly better.
Although R really knows how to do politics - you see how they're all suddenly anti-Israel a few months before the midterms when most of the country is probably going to vote against Israel?
> You plan to do nothing about them.
Here's another example, let's say we got the news from Andromeda galaxy that Andromeda Hitler is killing lot of people? What do you expect me to do ? Since space and time are equal, similarly we don't lose sleep over bad events that happened in the past.
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I don't know, I am a naturally anxious person even before I started reading the news daily, and I'm fine. Seeing the brutal chaos of the world definitely makes me appreciate the peace at home more. It's a grounding experience to be aware of the good and bad things that happen in the world.
I have no way to prove this, and likely you don’t either, but it’s likely it is affecting you but you are simply not aware of it.
probably making him "naturally anxious" lol
A past thread about one of the papers linked to in the OP:
Negativity drives online news consumption - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35197587 - March 2023 (355 comments)
Also applies to reading comments and replying to them. You don’t know these people.
But if it's a subject that interests you, you should participate.
This message is going to be read with a lot more of strangers than one. It is intentional.
One thing that really helped me was to start viewing my news media in black and white. Without the colored dressing, a lot of (especially partisan political) articles have much less emotional impact on me. Note: this worked particularly well for written media and less well for vocal media
For US-centric news, I really like the text only https://text.npr.org/1001
I think I like charts too much for text only, but this really does capture a common problem I have. A lot of articles seem to come with images that are almost designed to get the reader worked up. I think, at least in most cases, as a side effect, of selecting for reach and clickthrough rate? But that doesn't really help me and I'm not sure how to eliminate the "look how much of a jerk this guy is!" photos without also losing the charts.
https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100
The same as it was on tv when I grew up.
It's still mostly bad news? Also I don't see that big of a difference than the default NPR website articles, all they add is a bit of text formatting and an image.
They aren’t able to control whether the important facts people want to be updated on are positive or negative. But I find it less addictive to read the news with minimal colors and no images.
Avoiding the news and consuming it on your own terms infrequently is a fantastic way to solve this problem. Step 1: cut your cable and use your television as a computer monitor only. Source: myself.
gives me the idea, rank news items according to geographic distance, and "blast radius"
closer to you gives higher rank in the feed, tighter blast radius lower rank.
example, events in your present location rank higher, events 100miles away rank lower. police stopping someone for a seatbelt and issuing a ticket, likely ranks lower, vs evacuation order for city ranks higher.
a cheap way of assessing relevance score.
I only read local news. It’s pretty nice I don’t feel stressed at all. Turns out random shit far away has no significant effect on my life. And even if it did it’s not like I can do anything about it
What's your last local news source? I'm jealous of you that you have one. The place where I live had their local newspaper bought out and (in effect) shut down by Alden Global Capital (google them) nearly a decade ago. There's nowhere to go to learn about what goes on in city council or school board meetings, short of attending or logging into their streams - which, at least it's good we have those, but is hardly practical for most residents.
I live in Baltimore county and most of our local news is homicides and stuff like that.
I know some people who moved to Delaware beaches and they told me that there the local news is just folks talking about government administration stuff, which was pretty mind-blowing to me. I would like to check this out.
Same here, but I live in a developing country. I usually switch to international news (or tech news, or no news at all) because local news is mostly about murders and other terrible things. I have family in Portugal, and when I visited, I remember the local news being mostly about pastries and folklore events. I watched TV every day while I was there.
I used to read local news until they made an article "Top Ten dangerous places in our city" where they just listed a bunch of places that someone considered scary based on vibes.
I was talking to my aunt, who has never been much for technology, during covid. Never really had a tv in her home, etc. She's late 70's maybe early 80's now. Anyway, I was asking her how she was doing with all the chaos and she was just like "umm well I just live my life. I go out and volunteer and go camping, not much has changed...". She was just very unbothered by all of it (and she was a nurse for decades, so not in a "masks are criminal, social distancing doesn't work" way).
I more and more identify with that ethos. I want to be informed, but I don't want to be miserable from the bombastic 24/7 news cycle being shoved in my face when I can't do much about any of it.
The closing of Hormuz caused fuel prices to go up around the globe. Voting differently in the US could have prevented it.
So yeah, random shit far away can have significant effects, and sometimes you can do things about it.
That said, focusing on local news does sounds like a great approach, but international news still needs some attention.
You can vote against this trash and still not consume 99% of the "news" content people pretend is information. You don't need to know "the latest" about this second "administration". Consuming "news" is not a civic duty, it just is bad for you and a waste of your time. Don't be fooled.
I really don't think anyone voting against Trump was doing so with the Straight of Hormuz on mind.
Many said that the war with Iran was on their mind. You even have people in this thread saying that Harris being the war candidate was a factor
I don't think most Americans even knew what the strait of hormouz was, expecting them to vote differently based on that last November is wild. Trump constantly ran as the "no more wars" president and people fell for it. At that point, the blame is just for believing in that he was not lying. But strait of hormouz was a non topic for almost the entire world before the war.
It will impact how people vote this November though
but isn't expensive gas a local issue so local news will cover it regardless. That doesn't mean Americans will care about Hormouz in even an year imo. People only care when it affects their wallets.
November 2024 nobody could have reasonably predicted that the strait of Hormuz would be closed in February 2026 because Trump would declare war on Iran.
But they could have seen he was a fool and predicted that putting a fool in charge of the presidency would make something bad happen.
Last year we had stupid tariff wars, now we have stupid actual wars and a screw worm infestation. Who knows what's next? I don't, but I can predict it will be stupid.
I mean yes, but there are reasons why people vote for him even though it might seem stupid to you or me. Politics is a weird dirty game and its not just about good or bad or smart or stupid. It's mostly theatrics and media management. It kind of makes sense a reality TV actor can do well in these situations funny enough.
I agree with the sentiment generally, but there have been lots of times in history when recognizing that you should leave a place turned out to be life or death. The start of WW2 was random shit far away for a lot of people until it wasn’t.
I wish my local news wasn't mostly filled with people going missing and fires but at least balanced it with "this new restaurant just opened". If anything my local news is more fear driven than the national news.
It's a shame that local newspapers are dying, they are exactly the thing our generation needs right now.
You're here on Hacker News too though.
If there's a way to find happiness without social media, unfortunately, it won't be posted on social media.
Interestingly, I read more foreign news than local news.
> Humans evolved to pay close attention to danger, but today that instinct is being overwhelmed by an endless supply of bad news from around the world
This insinuates that the human brain can not cope with overflow of bad news. That's wrong. For instance, I stopped consuming horrible news media for the most part. So I get fewer bad news in. I also don't watch everything on youtube either; rather than watching a video where person xyz lost family members abc in some crash, I watch and study surstromming reaction videos (these are fascinating to me, because of group behaviour and also individual's showing varied results here). I can select what I do and watch; the whole article feels as if someone had a need to publish a paper rather than make an objective observation. Publish or perish days...
It's simple. The powers that be rely on the constant stream of bad news to convince the terrified population to give away what control they have. It's a spectrum- dictatorships use it, sure, but even democracies work with media to control the message, so people even continue feel the basic need to be governed. The whole thing is a psyop or sorts.
I do watch how much I'm consuming the news as it does impact my day, but part of the problem is that when I eventually go to look at news online, I'm immediately confronted with 8+ blurbs of what's made up of a majority of bad news.
I would like to look at one bad thing at a time, please, but I know that's likely not compatible with money making models.
There was a sign I saw locally a couple years ago that said it best.
"Turn off the news, love your neighbors"
One of the many effects of AI generated content is the even increased ubiquity of bad news. I wouldn't be suprised if more people develop problematic news consumption when the clickbait battle between AI generated text with the intent to grab human attention for ads or any kind of manipulation gets more and more extreme. Btw this article is 56% AI generated according to pangram, but I don't know how reliable those results really are (https://www.pangram.com/history/825843ae-35fc-4543-a41f-df49...). But my instinct tells me that it is not completey human, it sounds like telling an AI to be very concise, factual and eliminate wordiness, which a human who writes for a science online mag would do as well, but it reads "wrong", there is a lack of the natural rhythm human brains have when connecting sentences.
> Looking away is not the fix …
> The fix is to manage the consumption and the sources. …
> Containing news consumption to defined windows of time …
> Choosing depth over volume
Golden.
TBH, we must concentrate on what matters to us. When people cross that boundary, they not only hurt themselves, but end up hurting someone close by for issues from far far away.
You can just ignore it. Nothing changes as a result of being "informed."
The current high gas prices are the direct results of people not being informed two years ago.
“People” being informed is quite different from an individual being informed. Presumably you were informed back then, yet here we are still.
War with Iran was not on anyones bingo card.
No one expected the guy who previously almost decided to bomb Iran to bomb Iran? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/21/donald-trump-r...
I don't know what could be stronger evidence than that. People just decided not to pay attention to it.
We thought his handlers had a better wrangle on him.
Nah. People actively voted for a guy who said no war. Then he got the USA into a dumb war. Just like all the rest.
Voting has objectively not produced the results that the people have wanted, and this is not new. Voting doesn’t work. Being “informed” changes nothing. The only way the hoi polloi can have any effect whatever is typically through rather violent uprising. This works for maybe a generation, and then it all starts falling apart again.
People actively voted for a known serial liar, idiot, and warmonger who said no war.
Well, voting doesn't produce the results you want when you vote for a liar. That doesn't mean that voting never produces the desired result, just that it doesn't in that condition.
Well, politicians are generally liars. Trump, Obama, Biden, Bush, Clinton, Reagan… we can go all the way back to McKinley and I could easily say that the campaign people voted for was not what was delivered. Even more, it was usually the opposite.
Stupid shit should've been on everyone's bingo card. The exact format the stupid shit would take was hard to predict but there was definitely going to be a lot of it.
No, you're just highly misinformed. I could have told you a decade ago that all of this will play out in a second Trump term. The invasion of Iran was always going to be the culmination of the "War on Terror" and it was clear that Trump aligned himself with that political faction since long ago.
Are they? I think it could be the opposite, ironically. Trump is in many ways the result of news media directed at voters, which was mostly misinformation and propaganda.
Things are worse than ever. And these types of opinions are just Ostrich strategies. This worked fine 20 years ago, and would be a wildly inappropriate and irresponsible way to live today.
Yes, a lot of the news is sensationalized and blown out of proportion.
But also YES, things are absolutely trending in the wrong direction and you should both be aware of that and be loudly screaming about it. Going to protests, boycotting companies run by these CEOs leading us into oligarchy, and letting people know your stance.
The idea that "I can't do anything about it, so I'll just bury my head in the sand" is the rhetoric that the people benefitting from rigging the system want you to have. It makes it easier for them to screw you over.
No, your brain was neven designed for this much bad news. It also wasn't designed for the Internet, tv, smartphones, processed food, soda, painting, sleeping in a bed, to infinity. It's a garbage argument that falls apart at first glance.
Edit to add: I highly recommend meditation and days off from technology. But the answer is not what many people in this thread are proposing. Steve Bannon's "flood the zone" strategy is winning.
>these CEOs leading us into
>the people benefitting
>them
What an awful lot of "them". This populist rhetoric is way too easy, not to mention dangerous. The problems are real and as human beings we are all implicated in them. Not just the faceless "them" but also you, me, us.
Once ‘them’ disappears brain loses the control, leading to unbearable stress, and we are back to where we’ve started with this article.
It is ironic that original comment proposes to face the problem head on while applying typical ‘feel good’ and ‘stay in control’ mechanisms that have nothing to do with facing reality.
The grounded way is to acknowledge that you have limited or no control about the situation. And that oftentimes we are all part of the very same problem. Only from there you can work through the resulting pain and fear and other hard to bear feelings to actual meaningful strategies. This, however, requires years of emotional tolerance training and oftentimes therapy which (again, ironically) very few people have time or motivation for nowadays.
Sorry. This is addressed at the 99.9%. the them is the 0.1% of people that are responsible for the 99% of the bad news the article mentioned.
Didn't think that was needed to be pointed out.
It is natural that early brain evolved to handle "negativity bias" from local dangers, not 24/7 exposure to worldwide bad news.
But the author missed some key nuances.
- Whether a news is good or bad depends on the person.
- The same news is seen as good by one person but as bad news by another or not news by some. Good and bad is too general categorization.
- People seek out news naturally to expand the awareness. The author appear to make the point people are forced to know.
Reading Factfulness was an epiphany for me: our brains are wired to pay attention to the superdramatic in a way that is now harmful to it - the same way that preferences for sugar and fat are now harmful.
Factfulness helped to show me that, despite our brain's bias, the world is actually consistently getting better.
This was published in 2018, vut I believe some things have worsened in the last years for the west. Some examples are: Housing crysis, wars, rise of the alt right, loneless epidemic, betting, scrolling addiction.
If you want all your bad news once a week, you might be interested in: https://blog.sentinel-team.org/, which my team writes.
The brain was not designed at all.
All this at a time when world poverty is in continual decline, medical science reaches continual new heights, crime is in multi-year decline, etc.
It is often said that the average person today has better food, shelter, health services, etc. today than a king had just a short while ago.
Bad news sells, though. Don’t buy it.
I am at a point where i block people talking about specific issues i already know about. I already know it's bad, either tell me how i can help or leave me out of it.
I wonder if this applies to seeing successful people as well.
As for new habits: I stopped algorithmically curated news for myself. I use RSS and Leash as a browser:
https://leash.ax
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472475
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That fretting might be the key to human intelligence and evolution.
Relentless overthinking, all that blood flow to the developing brain. Nutrition and oxygen to those cells at incredible rates.
My focus is insane when adrenaline hits.
I’ve been known to argue with takeout cashiers over portion sizing for a full day hit before tournaments.
This is the type of comment that I expect to read on ‘looksmaxxing’ forums, where impressible young males are taught how to live life in very mechanical terms by sociopaths.
There are better ways to stimulate your adrenaline and stress response than picking fights with strangers.
Also our brains can't keep up with the Joneses at a worldwide scale.
> Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.
We're having too much of these look back to hunter-gatherer state of affairs to explain modern phenomenons. It feels like they didn't really bother looking for an actual relevant argument.
On one side, did hunters who analyzed the situation before moving actually not survive ? How would someone even prove such a claim ?
On the other side our brains have excelent plasticity and we're constantly surprised at how it can adapt to extremely impacting life events. Is our cognitive stuck to where it was hundred of centuries ago and couldn't adapt to the printing press or the internet ?
We might have social issues and huge problems to solve to better handle our current technical landscape, but going back to Neanderthals to find an explanation is a waste of time and good will IMHO.
There must be better science out there and people actually trying to tackle these kind of issues. What would be the Hank Green like people of these fields to who we should pay more attention?
No, human knowledge has definitely grown over time and the modern human in the modern society has access to a lot more information. But in terms of evolution, our brains are still pretty much what they used to be back then. That timeline isn't long enough to actually evolve our brain and how it processes things.
A lot of biases are present in our mind precisely due to how biology evolved the systems over millions of years. Humans have been around for only 300k-ish years.
However, you do need to study and research about how the brain works if you want to make these point and a lot of writers just misrepresent/misunderstand things because they don't do their research enough.
I think someone like Daniel Kahneman can be a good read if you are interested.
It's not a perfect analogy, but I understand the evolution argument as our "hardware" taking time to drastically change, and agree with it. From there, our "software" can IMHO evolve a lot faster, and we're probably able to rewrite how we use the hardware to a very low level. What esports player do in their heads on daily basis never stops impressing me.
> I think someone like Daniel Kahneman can be a good read if you are interested.
Thanks ! It's a bit sad D.Kahneman was already of pretty old age when the replication crisis hit the field. I saw a few of his talks from a few years later but don't remember him addressing any of the underlying research being put into doubt.
> We're having too much of these look back to hunter-gatherer state of affairs to explain modern phenomenons.
Indeed. These hunter-gatherer stories explain anything and predict nothing. Discard at will.
Given the audience here, I think an adjacent analogy would be “if we were to understand tech today, do we always go back to the beginning of tech?”
Then the answer is more clear as yes and no. Obviously much of our tech today adapts to modern innovations and standards, but it would not be hard to quickly find examples where even the most cutting edge tech are still being affected by the earliest decisions or natural limitations.
I've been thinking about it for a while and like the tech analogy a lot.
The interesting part to me is that we have many relics of earlier choices, but the reason they were set that way and the reasons we kept these choices around are completely different.
For instance choosing to start time at 1970 was to work around space limitations IFAIK, but we're still using that norm out of inertia and compatibility concerns.
I think that kind of logic applies to many human things as well, for instance at one point physical differences between men and women had a huge practical impact on the kind of "work" they could optimally do, yet the same kind of labor segregation today would come from a totally different place.
> “We're having too much of these look back to hunter-gatherer state of affairs to explain modern phenomenons.”
Sparks my imagination. Like sibling relations when you’re old. You must go back further and further to a time of innocence and ignorance to find agreement and common ground.
Negativity bias is a well-attested phenomenon, no? and one can derive the rest of the argument from that.
Indeed, they have all the intellectual rigour of Kipling's Just So Stories, and should be treated with as much seriousness.
HN is essentially the only news source that I consume in addition to local news that are likely to have stories that do affect me personally.
When I stopped reading X, I had this thought one morning:
> The political crisis, the bloody war, the looming apocalypse only exist to distract you from the fact that you didn't fold the laundry.
The longer I live news-free, the more I find it true.
This makes me feel like an alien.
I feel perfectly happy sorting by worst taking the top K and then understanding what can be mitigated etc
Not doing this is immoral IMO.
But I hear and understand certain kinds of people who say they can't deal with hearing about anything remotely unpleasant.
But then these same kinds of people seem to enjoy the kinds of horror or thriller movies I detest.
I feel alone and like an alien.
Brain wasn't designed for watching TV series too.
mp4tomp3.lol
Here's an idea... How about we put constructive and intelligent people in charge instead of the most compelling narcissists.
I have no doubt the waterfall of bad news could be good news if society were properly engineered in accordance with our scientific progress, rather than in accordance to the easiest accumulation of capital.
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I was under the impression that science did not believe that the brain was intelligently designed in the first place though.
A wonderful comment. But, "not designed for" encompasses badly designed, and also not designed and inadequately designed.
I think we can say the process (designed or otherwise) was .. organic?
"Not well adapted to", perhaps.
Dude, reweight your attention vectors. That's not supposed to be the take away from this article, I think.
News is a business. The mainstream media has made tons of money fabricating conflict or drama (see increase in use of “white supremacy” or “racism” in news). This has created mental angst in Democrats.
Thankfully the recent soccer World Cup is showing the world that America is the greatest country on earth. At least the foreigners will learn the truth (the democrats? That’s another story of perpetual self depression).