My interests: Journalism, Politics, International Relations, Urbanism
1 - The New Yorker is the best magazine in the English-speaking world. They employ incredibly good writers.
2 - Without The Guardian, British democracy is utterly fucked. The Brits just don’t know it. Most UK papers are owned by shady characters such as Jonathan Harmsworth. The Brits even have a paper (The Independent) owned by a politically-connected Russian mobster (Evgueni Lebedev).
The Guardian’s non-profit structure gives it more freedom that most UK papers. They often investigate stories the rest of the UK press just won’t touch: Paradise Papers, Panama Papers, Cameron’s tax evasion, etc…
3 - The two best newspapers in France are Le Monde and Mediapart, hands down. Mediapart is a non-profit. Le Monde journalists have special rights and can’t be removed by shareholders. These 2 newspapers are more independent than the rest of the french press.
4 - The Financial Times is the favorite newspaper of elites worldwide. CEOs. Billionaires. Millionaires. Presidents. Prime Ministers. Everyone reads it. And honestly, it’s very solid. The information is always extremely reliable. The FT is also the most expensive newspaper on the planet. But they sometimes publish free stories.
5 - The editorial section of the Wall Street Journal is directly controlled by Billionaire Rupert Murdoch. The WSJ is the jewel of his global media empire. Fox News and the New York Post are for influencing the masses. WSJ editorials actually allow him to have influence over US high income readers.
6 - If you read WSJ editorials, Rupert Murdoch’s ideas are very simple. Labor unions must be crushed. Corporate concentration is good. Netanyahu is a brave man. US military spending is good. Unions should be restricted by tough laws. Environmental rules are bad. Slash taxes on large corporations. Of course, he doesn’t write it openly. But this what virtually most of the WSJ editorial content boils down to.
7 - Many talented reporters work for the Wall Street Journal and end up deeply ashamed of it. It feels like prostitution. Many would much rather work for The Financial Times, New York Times or ProPublica.
Rupert Murdoch employs great reporters at the Wall Street Journal simply because he needs them to acquire credibility in order to influence readers through his WSJ editorials. If the WSJ was 100% full of trash, american high income readers wouldn’t purchase it.
8 - The best coverage of Silicon Valley is an online newspaper called The Information. If you truly want to know what Meta/Adobe/Microsoft executives are up to, read The Information. Most of their readers are very wealthy investors and rival tech executives.
9 - 90% of leftists who attack the New York Times are wrong.
"The New York Times doesn’t go after powerful people"
They literally took down Harvey Weinstein.
They literally went after Rupert Murdoch
“The New York Times is very pro-israel”
They exposed Israeli war crimes.
The Israeli Prime Minister says he hates them.
“The New York Times didn’t warn americans against Trump”
They did. They really did.
“The New York Times doesn’t cover labor rights”
They exposed how the biggest US Corporations illegally use child labor
They exposed Starbucks vicious war against unions
I’m not saying it’s a perfect news organization. A perfect news organization does not exist. But it’s a very solid one. 90% of leftists who attack it are using bad faith arguments.
10 - When it comes to television and radio, public media (PBS, BBC, NPR, CBC) is often more professional, more serious, than corporate media. PBS or CBC make outstanding documentaries. Stuff US/Canadian private networks just wouldn’t make.
11 - Generally speaking, journalism that you pay for is far better than journalism you don’t pay for. This is a general rule, not a law of physics. There are exceptions. The Daily Mail has subscribers. It’s largely non-sense. ProPublica is free. They do stunning investigations.
12 - AIPAC is a powerful lobbying organization. But there is limit to their power. There was an intense AIPAC campaign to stop the President Obama from signing a nuclear agreement with Iran. And he defeated them .
13 - Most Trump tweets aren’t written by Donald Trump. They are written by a dude named Dan Scavino. Most americans have no clue who Dan Scavino is. They wouldn’t know him if they met him in the supermarket.
14 - Having a lot of resources is a curse. Countries that have natural ressources (Iran, Algeria, Nigeria, Russia) tend to be highly corrupt and exploited by a small elite. It’s simple. The elite can take control of the oil fields, the gas fields, the mines. Just sell ressources. Shoot protesters. No need to invest in anything else. It’s much better to live a country with limited resources (Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland). Lack of resources force the elites to invest in science and education. The most unlucky country in Africa is Congo. It’s full of diamonds, forests, oil, gas, lithium, cobalt, rare earth. So Congo has suffered horribly because of that. In fact, it’s still being looted.
15 - If you want to transform an authoritarian regime into a democracy from within, the number 1 tool you need are powerful labor unions. Powerful unions can basically go on a general solidarity strike and shut down an entire economy.
16 - Everything Barack Obama predicted would happen if the US didn’t sign the nuclear agreement with Iran actually happened. Trump left the agreement. Iran started enriching nuclear fuel. Then a major war happened.
17 - Many Middle Easterners are very tribal. Most Israelis see themselves as Jewish first, Israeli second. Syrian druzes think of themselves as Druze first, Syrian second. Many lebanese Shias see themselves as Shia first, Lebanese a distant second. And so on. Their loyalty often lies more to their tribe than to the State they actually live in.
18 - Imperialism was bad. But imperialism didn’t actually cause instability in the Middle East. The most stable period was actually Ottoman Imperialism. For 5 centuries there was commerce and peace. Then, there was the British/French empire. Apart from some episodes of violence, it was stable. But when imperialism ended, it was basically a mess. Jews vs Arabs. Christians vs Sunnis. Arabs vs Persians. Jews vs Shias. Arabs vs Kurds. Alawis vs Sunnis. To this day, many of them have this tribal mindset.
19 - Saying “we don’t speak with terrorists” is completely dumb. Many terrorist organizations later became peaceful. Many terrorist leaders later became statesmen. It’s wrong to say “We can’t make any peace with those who hands are stained with blood”. Get out of here with that non-sense. If you truly want peace, seeking only decent leaders means you aren’t going to find anyone at all. Criminals make peace. This isn’t Scandinavia.
20 - The most ugly, polluted and noisy cities in the world have one thing in common. They have cars everywhere. The best cities in the world (Singapore, Geneva, Copenhaguen) all have one thing in common. They try to aggressively reduce car ownership. If you want to improve the cities, you need to increase parking costs. Pedestrianize streets. Build bike lanes. The hard part is the politics. Car owners see the short term pain. They never see the long term gains.
What are things you know because of your personal interests that most people have no idea about ?
As someone who’s into composting:
Some maggots (specifically of black soldier flies) can literally climb out of their buckets.
You can clean dirty/corroded electronic edge contacts with a pencil eraser. Also helps equally as cleaning preparation before soldering.
Go ahead and try it yourself on an old penny, it’ll clean up and look shiny as new. Same principle for electronics.
A good rubber eraser also takes sticker adhesive right off of most surfaces, safely.
My dad taught me this!
Awesome!
Yeah, there’s one drawback though, if the edge contacts or whatever trace was originally gold plated, the pencil eraser trick will pretty quickly wear away the gold plating.
But… If you got corroded gold plated contacts, the gold plating itself is the least of your worries, you want clean metal…
Gold doesn’t corrode, Hoomin…
If it’s corroded where the gold wasn’t … that’s different.
_ /\ _
I’m well aware of that actually. But if the gold plating is already worn and/or pitted, then the copper underneath will corrode through and even on top of the gold.
Plus, if it counts for anything, I happen to have an open faced USB-A flash drive on my pocket keychain, that actually does still have its gold contact plating, but just looking at it right now, I’ll have to clean the contacts once again from pocket crud before I use it again.
In that case though, I usually just lick my thumb, wipe the contacts clean, and dry it off with my shirt. Gold itself might not inherently corrode, but it can and will still get dirty, plus that plating is super thin and just regular use will eventually wear it away down to the bare copper underneath.
Psychopathy. Movies, sensational articles, pop-culture, etc. give a completely distorted view of the disorder and its place in the world.
- There are primary and secondary psychopaths. Primary being that it is genetic, secondary that is developed. So yes, in a way you can be born “evil” (of course the problem is that some definitions of evil don’t make sense).
- We don’t want to judge people for things they can’t change about themselves. Well here you have somebody who has about zero empathy, no feelings of guilt, remorse, or shame, by definition, and they were born that way (as primary psychopath). The emotional palette is pretty bleak.
- To add more relevance, this along with other Dark Triad traits is very prevalent in the most powerful people.
- There is progress, but no real standardised lasting treatment yet, though there are cases like this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-it-possible-to-treat-psychopathy-before-it-starts/?rdt_cid=5647051055037794503
- Psychopathy isn’t in any manual to be diagnosed with. Instead people get diagnosed with AsPD (Antisocial personality disorder). 2/3 of AsPD don’t qualify as Psychopaths. There is interesting history about why this is. It’s willful.
- The Hare checklist is an acceptable way to test for signs of psychopathy. But he specifically said it should not be used to justify the death penalty, which they do anyway. People sue about it, but they don’t even get heard.
For someone who knows about nothing about psychopaths and hasn’t interacted with one, it is literally unfathomable how cruel they can be without blinking an eye. Which is why it’s so important for psychologists etc. to have a file of facts about them, at the least, to figure out what’s true and what not, as they generally don’t care about lying or manipulating people for their own gain and have had to do that most of their lives.
So yeah, take a fucked up justice system, shitty social cohesion and declining resources in health and the disorder causes so much trouble for everyone. Sensationalism only makes it worse.
Another link to back some of this stuff https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7236162/
I gained 150 pounds since covid because I learned how to cook and frequently overate on my own cooking due to cooking too much, so I did a lot of research.
Once you reach 400 pounds (differs from body to body) your body starts to store fat within bones, making them brittle instead of stronger. If you break a bone at this weight you’re very likely to become close to immobile. Visiting the gym does not combat this.
There’s an existing cure for most chronic diseases. Unfortunately, no one seems to care, so it will likely never be available.
OP, given your knowledge of news media, perhaps you have some ideas of how to get coverage of the issue? I’ve written to dozens of news outlets about it.
IF that link is about fecal-transplant, to put a healthy biome into people,
THEN just taking a good pro-biotic, instead, puts a good microbiome into one ( cures diahrea in 2-ish hours ), if one takes it with a probiotic-supporting meal ( like one’s favorite diverse meal, including each of the kinds of food one eats, some starches, some proteins, etc… ), seems FAR saner, in my eyes.
The whole “you need a fecal-transplant procedure” thing is a scam, in my eyes, because pro-biotics provably work, after one’s gut has gotten borked ( by food-poisoning, by antibiotics, by whatever ), & it works in mere hours.
Repeatedly good pro-biotics have un-wrecked my gut, after things like food-poisoning ( & I’m a guy who’s racked-up 7+ years of outright-homelessness, so food-preservation isn’t always possible ).
Dad had been a medical-researcher: he taught me to think.
Getting the right diversity of microbes ( you need both Lactobacillus & Bifido strains, multiple of each ) in one’s gut doesn’t, in any way whatsoever, require any clinical-procedure.
It requires a good bottle of pro-biotics, of a good, trustworthy brand.
Doing the experiment is something that people can do on their own.
_ /\ _
Dad had been a medical-researcher: he taught me to think.
He didn’t teach you very well. Stop spreading harmful misinformation.
And to the people upvoting the misinformation, you really need to do some basic research and critical thinking first. Why would there be hundreds of FMT clinical trials around the world for curing chronic diseases if it were so easy with probiotics? Why would 60%+ of Americans have a chronic disease if you could simply cure them with probiotics?
It makes it seem very possible that the comment and upvotes above are deliberate astroturfing by the pharmaceutical industry.
Hoomin, do the experiment & use a good probiotic when you next get diarhea, take it with something mild, for them to eat.
It works in about 2h.
Evidence is worth more than industry-concerted-opinion, in evidence based medicine.
& keep deeming me to be machiavellian disinformation, all you want.
“Why would there be hundreds of FMT clinical trials around the world for curing chronic diseases if it were so easy with probiotics? Why would 60%+ of Americans have a chronic disease if you could simply cure them with probiotics?”
Because it’s profitable to not-treat-the-problem, & keep selling symptomatic-“treatment”.
Read “Money Driven Medicine” or “Doctored” which both seem to be on this fundamental-concept, if you want…
Doctored is written by a physician, who left the city, to escape the sociopathy of medicine as practiced there.
I don’t expect you to have the intellectual-integrity to do the experiment given what you wrote.
& that is fine.
Let the world be ruled by concerted-assertion, NOT by independently-verifiable-evidence-through-experiment.
Downvote me, though, because I’m contradicting your truth, & you want to make your world better, OK?
_ /\ _
I know more than I ever planned on knowing about audio equipment.
The first thing you need to know is that you cannot defeat physics with marketing hype. I don’t give a flying fuck how many wave guides Bose talks about or all the technology under the sun, you need a big speaker to make deep bass. There is nothing anyone can say or do to change this.
And when you look up audio equipment, ignore the “music power” because they will state what is the momentary maximum power the speaker can handle… but we don’t play micro seconds of MAX power music, we play steady audio… what you need to know is the RMS power the device can handle or output.
Furthermore, audio cables are a complete sham. You can take any power cable from a discarded vacuum, boom, you’ve got speaker cable. But but gold connectors… Yeah no.
John Carver torpedoed the “golden ear” self-deluded class, one time, purrfectly…
He had them appear to review/compare a pair of prototype amplifiers…
They did, eventually coming to the consensus that 1 was categorically better than the other.
Then John Carver removed the covers, & the ONLY difference between the amps, was the packaging they were in: the circuit-boards were identical.
He had ZERO respect for all the snake-oil bullshit stuff going on.
I’ve dug-into speaker-builder books enough to know that yes, waveguides do make difference in acoustics, & yes, you can hear that difference ( compared with plain-box speakers that are closed, all 'round ).
I have not paid-for any of the speaker-builder software ( & Linux has some FLOSS stuff, in that domain, anyways, now ),
but yes, it is actual-fact, that to make lower-frequencies of sound, you need bigger speaker-drivers.
For high-fidelity concert, I’d want 15" drivers, or pairs-of-12"-ones, on the sound-reinforcement speakers, if it were needing good quality bass. ( for a Liquid-Jungle genre concert, or something )
( I can’t hear low-enough to hear the lowest human-hearable frequencies, but others can: it’d matter for them, right? )
_ /\ _
Nobody said wave guides don’t help, but they don’t produce bass the way the marketing hype lies. They just don’t.
You left-out the critical resource of https://www.semiaccurate.com/ btw…
What a generally … outright-awesome post.
The Guardian changed-ownership recently, & cut their journalism-staff, savagely, ttbomk, AND they are now purged from DuckDuckGo??
searching for
kremlin papers trump site:theguardian.com
produces NOTHING at DuckDuckGo, now, & for the last few weeks, at-least?
& I’ve seen that FT definitely has anti-viability strategy in its pushing of distortion, in its stuff…
fscking-idiot webmastering at TheGuardian… WHERE’S THE SEARCH-FUNCTION??
https://www.theguardian.com/index/subjects/a
THAT page has a search-function.
??
WHEN I search on the keywords
kremlin papers
only-in-title, only-in-English, then click the button, then I get
So, TheGuardian IS BLOCKING DuckDuckGo for sake of kickbacks for Google-exclusivity??
Looks like it…
“Those who are ignorant of history, are damned to re-enact its disasters.” is true for our entire world, & especially true in the domain of journalism!
IF you keep disappearing historical key-information ( as for-profit, & for-institutional-status/importance, “journalisms” both do ), THEN you’re garrotting OUR WORLD’s viability!!
Scum…
The highest quality science-news is https://www.science.org/news
whereas the highest quantity of science-news is probably https://phys.org/latest-news/
( you have to fight with phys.org, as it keeps trying to prove one is just a bot, if one keeps digging into archives )
Salut, Namaste, Kaizen, & Gratitude for making this post!
_ /\ _
