Slashdot Mirror
Tech Reporting Is More Negative Now Than in the Past (betanews.com)
Wayne Williams, writing for BetaNews: A new study finds that tech reporting is generally more pessimistic now than in the past, and for two very different reasons. The new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), and based on textual analysis of 250 articles from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post from 1986 to 2013, highlights how the tone of tech reporting has shifted in the past 20 years. In general, the ITIF found that in the 1980s and 1990s, coverage of technology was largely positive, but this changed from the mid-1990s to 2013, when more negative reports covering the downside of technology, its failure to live up to its promises, and potential ill effects, started to appear. The ITIF attributes this shift to two main causes, the first being that "there has been a significant increase in the number of civil-society organizations and attention-seeking scholars focused on painting a threatening picture of technology," and second, and perhaps most pertinent, "news organizations are under increased financial pressure, and as a result, reporters may have less time and fewer resources to dig deep into technology issues."
Controversy and conflict draws attention.
I feel like almost all reporting is negative nowadays. Tech and science are the two categories that still have good news being reported.
When you're looking ahead, you often think of a bright positive future. You think of ways in which technology can make lives better.
It's when we're 'there,' when we're in the future, that we can look back and see the impact. It's a lot easier to analyze failure that has already happened than it is to anticipate the strange ways in which people work.
Back then, things probably seemed novel and exciting to a broader array of people. These days, I get the feeling that the people who were once excited about those things (myself included) now, often, see them as little more than faster and more complicated versions of the things they replaced. Another issue is people's preconceived notions about how the latest and greatest tech ought to be; I suspect that they feel let down by the slow progress towards the things they believe to be the way of the future. If these things are true, it's not surprising that people in all circles would tend to have a pessimistic outlook on technology.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
1. civil-society organizations and attention-seeking scholars
2. news organizations without sufficient resources to "dig deep"
Combine those two, and you get "attention-seeking news organizations".
"If it bleeds, it leads." The news organizations are always attention-seeking, and simplified, salacious news gets the most attention, even if it is incorrect.
This can be easily explained by a corporate shift from offering innovative products that fulfill consumer needs to offering products that exploit consumers in innovative ways. 20 years ago what we consider mundane "information sharing" would cause congressional hearings and indictments of CEOs.
80 and 90s we get a great deal of consumer electronics and computing products that were sold on merits. Late 2000s and into 2010s we have dominance of software that spies and manipulates user behavior for profit. Mid 2010s and we started to see "spies and manipulates" getting pushed into hardware under ruse of IoT.
Negative tone is a result of "You can't fool everyone all the time" playing out.
...companies pushing their "revolutionary" products when, in fact, they are pretty boring and run of the mill ( when not flat out crap, which is the norm ). That kind of bombastic nonsense works for a while, but eventually folks see through the bullshit so when any truly impressive product does get released, it's viewed through somewhat jaded lenses.
"Fool me once" and all that jazz.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
It's when we're 'there,' when we're in the future, that we can look back ...
But we're no more "in the future" now than we were yesterday, or the year before.
We've always lived in yesterday's tomorrow.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
In the 80s and 90s every new piece of tech wasn't a commercialized POS that was designed first and foremost to collect your personal information. The idea of the thing was to do something FOR you, not TO you.
So you're saying it's a holo promise?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Nonsense.
Both left and right have anti-science wings, both basically religious in nature. They are both slowly losing power as reality is observed by real world humans.
I'd like to see actual deathmatches between bible thumpers and nature hippies, that would be cool.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The tech industry has gone from scrappy underdog to juggernaut with 4 of the 5 biggest companies by market cap being tech companies. Unsurprisingly people's attitudes have changed, so the coverage has changed.
Or more likely the media has found that producing click bait article gets more readers and therefore more advertising revenue. The other notable thing is that technology is now more likely to be covered by a reporter who write about technology rather than an engineer who also wrote. One can produce in-depth analysis, test suites and a comparison between products, the other can rewrite the manufacturers information sheet and claim it as their own. Technology writers have become the McDonalds of reporting, cheap, quick, bland, low value.
It's like you just made that up. Oh you did!
Right now the lead article on Ars Technica is a highly positive review of the current state of VASIMR rocket engine technology: https://arstechnica.com/scienc...
But the author seems to be a frustrated SJW who couldn't resist a totally irrelevant slam at current US immigration policy, even though nobody has ever accused VASIMR developer Franklin Chang-Díaz of having sneaked across the border on foot.
I see little evidence that science is regaining ground. There has been far too concerted an effort in the last ten to fifteen years to demonize scientists, to make them out to be profiteering frauds. In the end reality will very much bring back the pro-science movement, but for now, even on Slashdot, the attitude on everything from climate change to basic research is incredibly negative.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Glad you used AC to post, because you assertions are utterly false. Silicon Valley is a hot-bed of people on the left, and it's been that way since the 1960's. Who do you think actually INVENTED most of the basis for new technology. Sure most of it was based on a Brit (think of Alan Turing), but the capital was in San Francisco, and most of those capitalists are (and were) left-wing thinkers, interested in making money by delivering stupendous new products/services. It's only LATER that Wall Street, and their greed, on into the act, and they are decidedly Republican, virtually to a man (of course, no women allowed).
I've been LIVING this stuff since 1961 (started on a vacuum-tube based RCA 301!) and I've watched it. What I can't abide is your attributions that are informed by mere ignorance. And, no, I don't post anonymously, because I'm confident of my facts.
Too much if it bleeds it leads, not enough actual comprehension of what they are writing about.
If you don't understand what's going on someone saying "It breaks matter down at a basic level and coverts it to energy" Is scary. If someone tells you "Invisible rays are passing through you and they can cause cellular mutations and cancers" it's scary. Then there is the basic competition between the people that do things and the people that tell you how to think about them.
In the '80s the right was pro-science and technology, and the left (or at least the stereotype of the left) was anti-technology.
Since the Reagan era, though the right has completely swung around and is now anti-science, while the left has only weakly shifted over and embraced science.
I don't see any such change, unless you're counting skepticism on the right about the hard-to-pin-down effect of carbon on weather, even when we observe warming (are we all going to die of thirst, or are we going to drown?) I don't hear much from creationists these days either.
Meanwhile the left hates technology just as much as it did in the Seventies, and has even started hacking away against pure research itself, as evidenced by their crusade against astronomy - a discipline whose vested interest is in a totally clean environment - first in Arizona, and more recently in Hawaii. If Trump accomplishes just one thing, let him find a way of locking these little weasels out of the court system so we can get human progress moving again.
We've almost reached the limits of physics and there's basically no viable competition because modern technologies require capex in an order of billions of dollars. What's there to marvel at or be happy about when, for instance, we've had a stagnation in the x86 CPU market since the introduction of Sandy Bridge (don't remind me of Ryzen: AMD has just reached IPC parity with two years old Intel CPUs)? Also GPUs don't grow as fast as they used to in the past, and even then in the past GPUs required passive cooling while certain modern GPUs have three slots cooling solutions with over 200 watts of power dissipation and have billions of transistors (NVIDIA Pascal Titan X has 12 billion transistors working at roughly 1500MHz).
However in my opinion it's astonishing what we've reached so far: certain modern computer games are just breathtakingly beautiful while not being too far off from being photo realistic: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Battlefield 1, The Division, Quantum Break and others. Recently, I just gave up on playing in The Division for two hours and just roamed NYC and enjoyed the scenery.
Just look at this and compare to this.
Nazis _were_ leftist. Shockley was a Nazi. You are right.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The problem being is that the effects of CO2 aren't that hard to pin down. The skepticism is basically fake, fueled by some of the wealthiest companies and individuals on the planet, even as they themselves prepare for the low-carbon future.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Absolute agreement. Every since the Neanderthals on Wall Street started dictating policy to Fortune 500's (and small firms let it trickle down to them), we've been at a growing war with the 1%. Latest news says there are SIX people who have more wealth than the bottom 50% of population of the WORLD! Their interests are served first. And, yes, Marx predicted that. Now, it's our job to get vocal, get active, and take our Democracy back, including the fundamental Constitutional right to privacy that has been so eroded by lawyers (and politicians, who are mostly made up of the lawyer class) in the past decades. And, not just in the U S of A, but throughout the world. It's pitchforks time, folks, and time to bring the corrupt interests (Exxon, GE, Microsoft, and thousands of others, and their kin in other countries) to heel. We, the masses, need to hone our skills at defeating their self-serving game.
Read George Lakott's take: https://twitter.com/georgelako...
and https://georgelakoff.com/2011/...
In general, the ITIF found that in the 1980s and 1990s, coverage of technology was largely positive, but this changed from the mid-1990s to 2013, when more negative reports covering the downside of technology, its failure to live up to its promises, and potential ill effects, started to appear. The ITIF attributes this shift to two main causes, the first being that "there has been a significant increase in the number of civil-society organizations and attention-seeking scholars focused on painting a threatening picture of technology," and second, and perhaps most pertinent, "news organizations are under increased financial pressure, and as a result, reporters may have less time and fewer resources to dig deep into technology issues."
(emphasis added) TFA doesn't bother to ask whether the negative coverage is actually accurate.
Probably too much to ask from a vapid hit-piece on journalism, scholars and people who dare to care about civil society.
The _actual_ scientists studying climate change will win in the end. The ones that want to shutdown modern society (nature hippies) will continue to be ignored, the world will not end. Climate models/datasets being advanced today are better than those being advanced 15 years ago. The most extreme of which have since been laughed out of the room (and edited out of the history by those who used to be claiming them as true).
Science is data driven. Lies can only be maintained for so long without just blowing off science and going full 'religious nuts' like creationists.
That said there is a large body of non data driven 'sciencish' work. Almost all sociology, psychology etc. That just needs to be ignored as the theology it is. The humanities attempts to wrap themselves in 'science' are a threat to it. But just like phrenology, it too will pass into 'bad joke' status.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Much longer than fifteen years. The romantic era is a rejection of the cold emotionless age of enlightenment. It takes generations before people begin to see the effects.
'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism
Now, it's our job to get vocal, get active, and take our Democracy back,
It has never been a Democracy. It was always an Oligarchy. The rich white men (mostly slaveowners) who were running the country wanted to keep running the country, and wanted to get the Monarchy out of it. But they didn't want every plebe to have a voice, that would be madness!
It's our job to get vocal, get active, and get Democracy. Abolish the electoral college, as well as the practice of denying felons the vote. That only creates more incentive to find those who are politically inconvenient guilty of a felony.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Having taken a college-level psychology course (which of course makes me an expert in the field!) I can tell you that psychology isn't necessarily as soft as you think, and while there are certainly holdover schools of psychology that are based on partial or total rubbish, when you start talking about cognitive psychology and behaviorism, these are just as hard a science as physics or geology, to the point that I got the strong impression that my instructor viewed many of the other schools pretty dimly as being as much wishy-washy metaphysics as anything else. Psychology is an awfully big field, so claiming most of it is rubbish is deeply unfair.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Silicon Valley is a hot-bed of people on the left, and it's been that way since the 1960's.
Unfortunately, money has a way of turning liberals into conservatives. The legal system is positively littered with ambulance chasers who became lawyers to fight the system from within.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't see any such change, unless you're counting skepticism on the right about the hard-to-pin-down effect of carbon on weather, even when we observe warming (are we all going to die of thirst, or are we going to drown?)
Yes, that is the effect of CO2 on weather. We are going to die of thirst, or drown. That's why they call it a chaotic system.
Meanwhile the left hates technology just as much as it did in the Seventies, and has even started hacking away against pure research itself, as evidenced by their crusade against astronomy - a discipline whose vested interest is in a totally clean environment - first in Arizona, and more recently in Hawaii.
I can't figure out WTF you're talking about in AZ, in fact it looks like astronomers there are winning victories to fight light pollution. The thing in HI is not left vs. science. To the extent that any of the people involved are lefties (which sure, some of them are) they have been whipped into a froth by right-wing politicians. And the battle ties into a fight for the land which the Hawaiian natives, frankly, have not given up fighting. Remember, it's not like they simply chose to join an empire.
If Trump accomplishes just one thing, let him find a way of locking these little weasels out of the court system so we can get human progress moving again.
Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it, and if Trump makes it harder for people to fight larger entities in the courts, you are not going to enjoy the consequences. No one who will has time to post on Slashdot. They are all off fucking a Russian model or something.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So simply to compete, websites will promote FUD, warnings, threats. And the race to the bottom goes on with more shrill headlines and reports and more and more FAKE NEWS.
A possible fourth reason is that pre-2000, most tech reporting was intended for technically literate individuals. Ones who implicitly recognised dangers and didn't need them spelled out. But since "tech" has become mainstream, there are far more clueless idiots trying to do stupid things with technology. Maybe the negative articles simply reflect the (far) lower levels of competence among the audience for technology content?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Negative reviews are more fun to read than the positive ones.....
love is just extroverted narcissism
Go shopping for a TV - see if you can easily find one that doesn't spy on you. Go shop for a mobile phone, I don't think you could find one that doesn't spy on you. Try to sign up for an online social group or communication tool, good luck finding one that doesn't stalk you across internet and sells your information to the highest bidder. Now tell me that ANY of this is driven by consumer demand.
was largely positive, but this changed from the mid-1990s to 2013,
The thing to understand is, this is not limited to tech. There has been an assault for a decade or two now on the public being happy in any way. You are meant to be riled up and agitated.... to what end I cannot say. But the end effect is not good, you can tell this is bleeding into everyone's real lives, affecting relationships and general behavior.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No it's not. NEWS AT 11!
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
"I can't figure out WTF you're talking about in AZ, in fact it looks like astronomers there are winning victories to fight light pollution. The thing in HI is not left vs. science. To the extent that any of the people involved are lefties (which sure, some of them are) they have been whipped into a froth by right-wing politicians. And the battle ties into a fight for the land which the Hawaiian natives, frankly, have not given up fighting. Remember, it's not like they simply chose to join an empire."
You may not have been in Arizona long enough to have known what I was talking about, but protesters working for an outfit called Deep Green Resistance spent years filing fatuous lawsuits against the building of several large telescopes on Mt. Graham in the southeastern part of the state. The first excuse they used was critical habitat for red squirrels living on the mountain. When that fell flat, red squirrels being both common and not endangered by this particular type of human activity, Deep Green switched its attack to a claim that the site was sacred to the San Carlos Apache, a tribe which lives nowhere near the mountain and never evinced particular interest in it. During Clinton's second term construction was finally accomplished, years late and far over budget. That's the Greens' whole strategy - keep throwing groundless legal objections at the wall until even if nothing sticks, the target project becomes too expensive to finish. One argument that the Greens actually used in Arizona was "Build in Hawaii instead, because it's an even better site for astronomy!"
Having been unsuccessful in Arizona, Deep Green moved its attack to Hawaii, where they have been delaying the Thirty Meter Telescope by whipping up a native rights controversy. That is what is wending its way through the court system now.
This is Deep Green's manifesto against astronomy: https://dgrnewsservice.org/civ...
The author of this piece, Will Falk, has been all over Mauna Kea, egging on the protesters.
Both left and right have anti-science wings, both basically religious in nature. They are both slowly losing power as reality is observed by real world humans.
They might be losing numbers in terms of people and members, but they're gaining tremendous power these days.
So you really think that these particular people are liberals first, and not wackos first?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There is an overload with information - to stand out you have to attract consumer. What better way than by using headlines and copy that causes emotions. One of the most powerful ones are negative emotions like anger, fear. That is why we no longer have conversations on merit. Mention Trump or abortion and people's head explode. Now everything is at emotional level - we grow apart every single year!
I said 'almost all' you said 'most'.
Do you have any evidence either isn't true? Sure their are a few people in any field that respect scientific method. But are they more than 1-5% in the soft sciences? How many don't abuse statistics? How many even have enough math to not abuse statistics through ignorance?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
It has never been a Democracy. It was always an Oligarchy. The rich white men (mostly slaveowners) who were running the country wanted to keep running the country, and wanted to get the Monarchy out of it. But they didn't want every plebe to have a voice, that would be madness!
You can trash the founding fathers of this country all you want, but they instituted a form of government that gave every plebe far more autonomy than ever existed in the past, even giving the plebes the ability to change it or abolish it if necessary.
It's our job to get vocal, get active, and get Democracy. Abolish the electoral college, as well as the practice of denying felons the vote. That only creates more incentive to find those who are politically inconvenient guilty of a felony.
Here's a thought experiment for you: Do you suppose Democracy would lead to more laws being passed or fewer laws? If the former, would that lead to more felons, or fewer?
I agree that former felons ought to have voting rights restored. But I really think they should ALL rights restored, including their 2nd amendment rights.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I remember that in the past, PC magazine articles etc were nearly always gushing with ridiculously unrealistic positivity about anything new or novel. If every new thing they wrote about actually changed the entire world even half as much as they all claimed it would, we'd all be living like the Jetsons by now.
I think its acutally a good thing that a little bit of skepticism has crept in since those days.
That said I'm still amazed by how many tech product reviews apparently feel the need to totally avoid documenting any significant faults with the product being reviewed, even if they are glaringly obvious from other sources. At best its very unprofessional, at worst they've clearly sold out and are not acting in the best interest of the reader.
I agree with the assessment. I also think the advent of social media and smart phones/tablets have added to negative views of technology. Most of us now have a small portable computer (which also makes phone calls) that we can pull out, at a stop light, and check Facebook, etc, etc. So there are real physical dangers in the current era of computing. I'm guessing nobody in the 1980's imagined anything like that while they were on their Commodore 64 and watching Computer Chronicles on PBS.
This newsgroup has been around for decades, reporting on the downsides of technology, so it's nothing new.
Between something 'negative', as in bias, and reporting facts that are not pleasant. Let's be honest: a lot if tech companies these days are engaged in ridiculous amounts of hyperbole, if not flat out lies about their endeavors and their potential, and engage in practices that are so unethical they make the head spin. Something millennials really need to absorb: just because the truth of a situation is uncomfortable does not mean you bury it. You can't change a situation by running away from it or trying to obliterate knowledge of it. Grow up.
My experience from my coursework was that the cited studies seemed to me to be pretty rigorous. There was an entire section dedicated to what might have been titled "junk science", though as I recall the authors of the textbook used a somewhat more diplomatic term. In there were all kinds of commonly-held disorders like pre-menstrual syndrome, seasonal affective disorder in the like where research suggests that while the disorders may be real, they in fact effect a far smaller group of people than earlier studies had claimed. In other words, even in psychology it sure looks to me like there is at least some psychologists who follow valid methodological principles.
The other thing to remember is that "psychology" is a pretty damned broad term, and that in a lot of cases other professions like psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, counselors and the like often get lumped in, and in some cases these other groups publish in journals of varying degrees of quality. That's not to say that some of these people don't adhere to pretty strong methodologies, but it does tend to be a bit of a wild west in some cases. But when you're talking about cognitive psychology and other similar branches, there's a lot of overlap there that pulls in neurological experts, behavioral experts and the like who sit within the harder edges of the psychology field. It most certainly isn't all just kooky neo-Freudians.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Just take a look at any of the places where we've historically gone for tech journalism. There's very little difference between a publication like Endgadget and the Huffington Post. My complaint is this: for the last two years, tech publications have completely lost their focus on tech in favor of divisive political content. The writers they're hiring are not tech writers. So when you have an article that would normally be a fairly good tech article, by the older standard, it falls on its face because the writer doesn't know what he's talking about, and the editors don't seem to care. {*caugh* Mashable} Even PC Magazine has fallen to political punditry, and nobody, absolutely nobody seems to care.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
'Fascism' didn't exist in the 20s. The term was coined by Mussolini. His government was socialist plus nationalist.
The oft quoted statement by Mussolini about corporations neglects to mention the only corporations in fascist Italy were government sponsored ones, non-profit NGOs in modern parlance.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Which are you?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Which are you?
I am a dictionary-definition liberal.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Which definition? Certainly not: "Pro liberty'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Which definition?
I am opposed to government meddling in what I do in my house, but I am in favor of government meddling in everything that business does. You know, the definition. Conservative, of course, is the opposite. Populists want to control both. Anarchists want to control neither. According to the libertarians I am an upper-left centrist (hey, they have a snazzy test) but I personally think I'm more left than they think I am, and less upwards.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Only now that Steve Jobs is gone that the tech media now has the "courage" to criticize Apple and their products.
Who apparently lack the upper body strength to lift a sheet of paper, we'd have more positive things to say about them other than pointing out that their machines have sacrificed every performance characteristic for weight. And that their tower, while it may be the best Mac Mini ever made, is not a substitute for an actual tower.
Don't blame the messenger.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Between the 1980s and about 2010 the 'bible thumpers' just owned the Rs structure in many states. They _are_ dumb as rocks, but they show up. 'Showing up' is 50% of anything.
The 'nature hippies' never controlled the Ds when the Ds were having a winning year. They don't now either. Sure they get a nominee, once in while, but that nominee is unelectable. They don't show up consistently. Thank dog for all the drugs they are on.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You misspelled 'especially'.
I mean come on, really? They're trying to draw a conclusion from a 27-year period and only sampled a pitiful 250 articles, or just nine articles per year -- and from only three publications at that? What we have here is an analysis of the methodology used to select the incredibly tiny pool of articles surveyed, not anything meaningful relating to the press' coverage of technology as a whole.
> Now tell me that ANY of this is driven by consumer demand.
Yes, it is. Users don't care about privacy, or, for that matter, any hidden consequences (which is why usury thrives). Breaking the spell of rent seeking behavior now corroding our society is a difficult one. Starts with basic education of the technicalities, as well as financial literacy (many of lessons there extend beyond that of financial field).
Paranoia as such is only overreaction to false dillema, often with detrimental consequences. Not only needs one to ask "cui bono" and merely be paranoid and patently avoid it - that's only half of the thruth. They need to ask if the hidden trade is worth it - usury can be still useful if the borrowed capital can be reinvested in profitable venture.
To give an example, stonewalling facebook and whatsapp - the trade is seemingly "give up your privacy, or you'll get socially isolated". But it is a false dillema. Purchase a burner phone number online (~$1), set up the account via Tor, it's a fair trade.
One of my all time favorite Bloom County's: Offensensitivity. That was 35 years ago.
available when you were born is boring
Not really. I'm having quite a bit of fun with my 35 year old atari computer. It can't do crap, but the nerd in me is like - wow I never fully understood how most of this worked when I was a kid, but now I do and it is very clever what those people did with what they had.
I see zero reason to keep the Electoral College.
Because removing it turns the country into an empire ruled from the cities. The EC balances out different cultures. Without it absolutely no concerns of rural Americans would be addressed. As an American living in a rural area, this is not in my interest.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Tech has become infested by sociopaths and managing nerds is now a second career for people who fail out of Wall Street. So, there are a lot of shitty tech companies and the ethics of the industry have collapsed. It shouldn't surprise anyone that tech reporting is becoming more negative when tech reality has also become a lot more negative
I hate to use a religious test, but 'By their fruits shall you judge them' is pragmatic.
Science produces results, religion, not so much. Find me a religion that says: 'go with what works, make sure you aren't fooling yourself.'
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Some will go/remain fully 'religious nuts' like creationists/commune dwellers. No disputing that.
Outside small enclaves of similarly minded nuts, how much influence do you think creationists/marxists have?
The worst they can do it influence things like grade school textbooks (by fanatical persistence). Which is, in fact, good bullshit detection training for growing kids. If a kid can't spot a commie/creationist by now, (s)he is likely too dumb to matter anyhow. The world will continue to need ditch diggers.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'