news
Welcome to c/news! We aim to foster a book-club type environment for discussion and critical analysis of the news. Our policy objectives are:
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Newcomm and Newsmega Rules:
The Hexbear Code of Conduct and Terms of Service apply here.
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Low effort material: Avoid memes/jokes/shitposts in newscomm posts and top-level replies to the newsmega. This kind of content is OK in post replies and in newsmega sub-threads. We encourage the community to balance their contribution of low effort material with effort posts, links to real news/analysis, and meaningful engagement with material posted in the community.
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American politics: Discussion and effort posts on the (potential) material impacts of American electoral politics is welcome, but the never-ending circus of American Politics© Brought to You by Mountain Dew™ is not welcome. This refers to polling, pundit reactions, electoral horse races, rumors of who might run, etc.
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Electoralism: Please try to avoid struggle sessions about the value of voting/taking part in the electoral system in the West. c/electoralism is right over there.
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AI Slop: Don't post AI generated content. Posts about AI race/chip wars/data centers are fine.
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This is meant as no discredit to his work but a surprising lot of his research is just being like the only guy who actually reads the "gajillion dollar investment into AI" stuff on a contract level to find out it's "we're going to build 8000 datacenters that'd use up more electricity in a month than has ever been produced"
It's a bit trite but in his video on plagiarism, hbomberguy points out that if something is really easy to check out, nobody does.
Kind of like how Karl Marx had a set of big naturals
Who would have thought that actually looking into things would be part of modern journalism. Not me! I thought they were just supposed to copy and paste state department press releases.
Modern journalism is just stenography for the authorities
I know I know but in my heart I still think: Surely something of this much size and importance has at least a facade you gotta get past and doesn't run, explicitly stated, on the idea that a wizard will do it
actually doing the reading is a big part of being good at any field. i remember being struck by Michael Hudson mentioning some minute detail of the latest like 500 page US treasury report and thinking like oh right dude is serious about his work and actually reads those cover to cover
That's why I have @grok read and interpret everything for me.
jk, of course. But that sort of thinking is probably why Zitron is the only dude actually reading these things.
You'd be surprised at how much 'novel' information you can gain on any particular subject by just reading public records and talking to people. People tend to be extremely siloed into their particular tasks, not having the time or energy to actually investigate the larger issue.
Literally this was how Marx did his research for Capital, though he focused alot more into mathematical modeling alongside that data.
However, much of this phenomena has to do with the fact that if someone within the organization discovers it, then they are usually obligated to fix it, even if they didn't cause it, which discourages most employee investigation and reporting of issues, especially ones that the bosses are keen on pushing.
🤷 You can be ahead of the news/journalism most of the time on all sorts of topics when do basic investigation like that.