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Comment by spaceprison | Hacker News Reader

I grew up listening to NPR, it was always on. Car talk with my dad on the weekends, Prarie home, etc. It's been programed in every car I've owned since I was a teenager. My wife and I have listened together and donated for years. But starting around 2019ish it gotten harder and harder to stay engaged with the programming.

Almost every piece of reporting is now some kind of soft-outrage human-interest pseudo news. I want to listen but every other story is a tale of victim hood and oppression. It's just too much.

View on HN

Every time I tune in, I measure the time-to-race, which is the amount of time that passes before race becomes the main topic of discussion. Usually it’s less than 15 minutes.

Similar!

I think some of the flagship programs talk nonstop about LGBT and minority issues, but this has been a thing for some years. I remember pre COVID driving to work chuckling at how every time I turned on the radio, it was a story on those topics.

There is a lot more going on in the world that can also be discussed.

I like Weekend edition and All Things Considered, and their hourly news updates.

Finally: there is a distinction between a faux "both sides" centrism and constant focus on identity. Having a liberal bias can exist while providing a wide range of coverage and de-emphasizing identity politics.

If my local affiliate talked about LGBTQ stuff I would probably start turning the radio on again.

If we could solve these issues, maybe we could stop talking about them

Does force feeding develop an appetite?

Even minorities sometimes want to hear about something other than being a minority.

Especially minorities. Listening to liberal white people talk to other liberal white people about race is the eye-gougingly terrible.

I’m white, but I often notice all white panels discussing how awful white people are, but somehow neglected to invite a non-white person to participate in the discussion.

And when they do, it’s someone they hand-picked to say the things they want to hear.

I’ll note this though: I think the people who do this don’t really identify as “white.” It’s become a class marker. Your plumber is “white.” NPR listeners aren’t “white.”

What are you talking about? Honestly what weird strawman are you trying to set up?

NPR listeners aren't white? What are you trying to say here?

“White” is a socially and culturally constructed label, not an ethnic group. For example, Germans and French people in those countries don’t identify as “white”—they identify as German and French. It’s a label created in the context of racial politics.

My theory is that NPR listeners no longer really identify with the label “white.” They might acknowledge the label applies to them. But when they complain about “white people” they are referring to other white people.

When progressive "solutions" are implemented, if their success is measured empirically at all, they usually just make things worse. See e.g. the outcome of most educational reforms of the past 20 years, or the attempts in America's most progressive cities to solve homelessness by incentivizing and rewarding homelessness.

Not surprising, a lot of profitable rackets depend on those issues remaining unsolved. What would e.g. all the homelessness experts do, who collect billions annually to hold conferences where they agree with each other on settler-colonialism and the newest genders, if they were to actually solve homelessness?

Climate change is being solved, but it's being solved through technological innovation, not masturbatory discourse.

Virtually every person I talk to who remembers will tell you that the 90s were the peak of just about everybody in the country getting along and feeling good about the future.

Then widespread internet and social media happened, which shortly led people into echo chambers while simultaneously gutting the institution of journalism.

We didn’t light the fire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots

“the most destructive period of local unrest in U.S. history”

>90s were the peak of just about everybody in the country getting along and feeling good about the future.

What? All joking aside, what the Fuck?

Rodney King. LA riots. NAFTA protests. Branch Davidians. Presidential sex scandals. First desert storm. Political correctness. Women's movements. Bosnia et.al. Rwanda. HIV/AIDS epidemic. Ruby Ridge. Wage stagnation. The final death of small town commerce due to Wal-Marts.

And these are just the things I thought of in the last minute. I'm sure there are a ton more issues I'm missing.

The people you talk to are doing what people have done since the beginning of time. They're remembering the past fondly while forgetting the bad.

Don't forget peak crime including the introduction of school mass shootings (Columbine).

I read this to the tune of we didn’t start the fire. Was nice.

"Do you ever buy eggs at the super market? Well, here's how eggs are secretly racist, and the facts of egg economics disproportionally affects minorities."

Hot take... How many other news sources discuss race?

I think this is an under-discussed topic for how pervasive a problem it is in our country. And I think we do ourselves a disservice by trying to hide from it. The more we talk about it, the easier it is to pick up a discussion where we left off.

And my guess here is that the proportion of news about this relative to proportion of people affected by that news is way off.

is listening to people talk about it on the radio the 'discussion' we need to make progress on an issue like this?

compare to Car Talk - a show that entertains you and teaches you about engineering. different value propositions of these two things

> The more we talk about it, the easier it is to pick up a discussion where we left off.

Sure.. but.. does it lead to problems actually being fixed?

Not by itself. But if we don't talk about it, how could there possibly be hop of fixing anything?

I think it's a question of measure. When things are talked about fairly and equally then progress is made - there are serious pressing issues right not and they're not only about identity/race/gender, that these things are ignored is a big problem. When things turn full on on one direction they don't accelerate any progress, it may actually do more harm than good.

By focusing less on race and other identity issues, and working to remove racist policies across the board regardless of which group they benefit or harm. The 20th century saw immense improvements for almost all underserved groups, without any talking heads bickering about intersectionality or identity. Now that kind of coverage is everywhere and progress has stalled or even reversed in many areas.

My impression is that a huge portion of identity politics and coverage is more about picking fights where each side can feel smug and superior, rather than actually changing things for the better.

So this would be under the umbrella of "Critical Race Theory" which has been misrepresented and unjustly criticized as of late.

Maybe. Despite the number of times I've heard about CRT and how bad it is, and how good it is, I still don't have the foggiest idea what it is. One time, I tried to look it up on the internet. Signal to noise was so bad, I still don't know. I've written off the possibility of ever knowing what it is or understanding anyone who's talking about it.

As with any field, there's a number of detractors and charlatans. With CRT in the political spotlight, I completely understand how it becomes a mess to make heads-or-tails of.

Broadly speaking, it's the study of how law and media impacts society's view and treatment of others through the lens of race.

As for my opinion on it:

I generally support it because it advocates for another mechanism to study the impact of law.

I think most legislation should be regularly studied for impact, effectiveness, and fairness. For example, stimulus bills ought to be reviewed for economic impact, regulation ought to be reviewed for effectiveness/relevance, laws with social impact ought to be reviewed to ensure it doesn't harm the people.

A number of scholars seem to adopt a blameless mentality to figure out how laws (even unintentionally) have negative impact, and use that to propose solutions. I admire this approach to legislative critique.

While I think a few ideas some scholars advocate for are infeasible to implement, the broader field has a lot of merit.

How does one address racist policies without discussing race? That's a knot I can't tie myself into.

The more we talk about it, the angrier people get. That's truly the only reason to even have a conversation about my ancestors I never met owning your ancestors you never met. Things have gotten substantially worse in the last 16 years, not better, and that's because we've been using a spotlight to point out how different everyone is from each other. It's literally counterintuitive.

> The more we talk about it, the angrier people get. That's truly the only reason to even have a conversation about my ancestors I never met owning your ancestors you never met.

Maybe the "statute of limitations" for these things should be long - not to mention the idea that racism wasn't magically fixed by ending slavery and the "owning" you mention. You don't think anyone was actively racist and causing harm 10 years ago? 20 years ago? 50? So if person Y's grandparent was harmed by, say, person X's racist grandparent in the 1950s, and that caused person Y's family to suffer for generations compared to what likely would've happened otherwise, and that's leading to ongoing societal harms, it could be legitimate public policy interest to try to even out opportunity.

Of course, this hasn't actually changed in the last few decades - terms like "equal opportunity" and "affirimative action" have those words in their very name.

But certain interests have made very successful pushes in the past few decades to brand policies under those umbrellas as "actually the real racism", or paint everyone supporting them as "actually trying to guarantee equality of outcome," while continuing to beat the very-old drum of "people being worse off implies worse ability, it's just science" which couples oh-so-very-nicely with the more active forms of denying people opportunity that hardly ended in the 1960s.

It is a legitimate topic of discussion.

The problem comes when it’s the ONLY topic of discussion. Inflation is only relevant in how it impacts minorities. COVID is only relevant as it impacts minorities. Climate change is only relevant as it impacts minorities. Quality of schools is only relevant as it impacts minorities.

When it’s your only lens, it can distort your views, and in the case of NPR, caused them to get some stories wrong. Which then destroys your credibility which is really the only currency a journalist has.

The last time slaves were held in the US was by Native Americans in 1865. The country was founded in 1776. That means in a country that is nearly 250 years old, we haven't owned slaves for more than 160 years, well over half the nation's entire existence. No, we do not need a statute of limitations that encompasses generations for the sins of their fathers.

In fact, how far back do you even take this? Should we also hold the people of the modern-day Republic of Benin responsible for what their ancestors, the Kingdom of Dahomey, did, which was abducting and selling their African brothers for a bit of cash?

To address your other point, if my grandfather did something to hurt your grandfather in the 1950s, and it's been 70+ years and the only thing your family has figured out how to do since then is complain about how some guy was mean to your ancestor that one time, and that life is so unfair and you're so oppressed because of it, the issue may not be my grandfather, it may just be your family and their victimhood mindset. It feels good to "be oppressed" and have personal responsibility taken away, because when it's always someone else's fault, it can never be yours.

It's hard to read

> I was giving a lecture on genealogy and reparations in Amite, Louisiana, when I met Mae Louise Walls Miller. Mae walked in after the lecture was over, demanding to speak with me. She walked up, looked me in the eye, and stated, “I didn’t get my freedom until 1963.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/437573/blacks-were-enslaved-...

It's an unspeakable evil. The "statute of limitations" on sins of the fathers is "until atonement".

That's awful that happened to those people, but this doesn't really serve the point imo, as this was already illegal by then. They even said that people hearing their story suggested they should've gone to the police for help, but the land was too large for them to escape.

Even today, there's plenty of forced labor and sex slaves that exist in the USA. That doesn't mean it's an active systemic issue of oppression, it just means that bad people do bad things when they can get away with it, in spite of a system to stop it.

We shouldn't hold people who didn't do bad things accountable for the actions of people who have done bad things. I don't think that's a radical idea.

On one of my other comment threads someone told me how the world is "so much better then any point in history" :). I'm not sure I believe that.

I think in general being able to have these conversations means that we can progress slowly. It's tough recently, cause we've definitely regressed a lot. It would definitely help if the internet weren't effective at telling us only what we want to hear. I guess, in general I think the problem is we aren't actually able to progress discussions.

So my original wording "pick up where we left off" was wrong. We can already do that, we just can't move on from there. I think if we can figure out how to do that without hitting each other then maybe the problems would get fixed.

The New York Times, which is the other bastion of the liberal establishment, also covers race a lot (in regular news journalism, opinion, and topical articles). . It's gotten to the point where lots of comments on articles (many articles have active comments sections) ask "why are you making this about race?". I think NYTimes swung heavily progressive a few years ago, and it was very unpopular, and they're recalibrating to be more relevant to centrists.

NPR, being the whitest place on Earth, is a bad place to discuss race. And the only reason they discuss it constantly is because they think that Democrats own any issue relating to it. Actual interest in issues around America's race problems would result in knowing a single person with two black parents, who is not an immigrant or the child of immigrants, and who is not wealthier and more privileged than you are.

This probably describes a single-digit percentage of the people who produce content on NPR. They know the two or three black people who hung out in their circles in the elite colleges they went to, and only stay in contact with zero to one of them. They pretend to know every famous black person they met at a dinner party, or a conference; there are probably 100 black professors, writers, and entertainers that a million or two white NPR-Americans are pretending to be friends with.

Black wealth peaked in 1997. NPR supplies itself from the most elite circles in American society, who largely control its wealth. They're not actually concerned, they're consistently using race as a cudgel to attack other white people for their own purposes.

> NPR, being the whitest place on Earth

Come on, they're about as diverse as America itself is: https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179803822/people-at-npr

In fact, Black people are proportionally overrepresented relative to the U.S. population at NPR, while Hispanics are underrepresented.

Sunday morning's Weekend Edition host, Ayesha Rascoe, is a Black woman. Unfortunately they lost Audie Cornish, also a Black woman, from All Things Considered. She was great.

I do think it's fair to argue that NPR is far more liberal than it ever was, and Uri Beliner's inside story provides some credence to that. But that's different from being "white." (Keep in mind that the vast majority of Trump voters are white and would bristle at NPR's news programming; support by non-whites is relatively low.)

Converse hot take, the shallow "race lens" that is all too often used is not helping anyone. Quite the contrary, it is growing counterproductive. Especially with stories like this where they are working backwards from the framing, not using it to learn something.

It completely, utterly, baffles me how other people live in such a different interpretation of reality than me. For myself, the last decade of media has been completely dominated by race-based and identity-based ideology and discussion. I've given up all mainstream media and I still cannot escape it. The fact that someone exists where they can with a straight face say that they think race is an under-discussed topic just blows my mind. To the point where I seriously have to consider whether I'm even replying to a real human being and not a shill / LLM.

My perception is the opposite of yours so I guess we can be as equally confused as each other. Every time I tune into the news it's usually dominated by foreign policy, domestic horserace politics coverage and soft human interest stories. There was definitely an uptick in racial discussions during all the BLM stuff but "completely dominated" is very, very far from my lived experience.

But I guess that's exactly what an LLM would say, isn't it?

I don't know what that guy is smoking. It is objectively the case that the topics of race, identity politics, etc have skyrocketed since the mid-2010s [1].

[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...

Do those charts actually show a shift in content, or is it merely a shift in terminology?

I'm not sure if any studies accurately measure the subject content, and it also seems like it'd be easy to get any result you want by tweaking the experiment parameters.

I can tell you that from my own life experience and what I can recall, it has certainly felt like a shift in content. All the anti-white stuff, the social justice stuff, the pro-censorship stuff, etc. It existed before in tiny bubbles like Tumblr, but it was during the mid 2010s that the major news sources started adopting those viewpoints too.

They don't even show it as a percentage of articles.

It's suspicious to me that they went for the hockey stick curve to demonstrate their complaint rather than adjusted for the number of articles that they are sampling from.

Yeah... I don't know what you think I was saying. But I'm making the case that the news should cover issues that people actually face... And that an uptick in representation of different people's viewpoints and experiences is actually a positive and reasonable thing. It would be more informative if your data had that as a percentage of total articles. Because the case I'm making is that we went up from like <1% of articles talking about race to closer to 20-30% of articles talking about it. The other thing to consider is what qualifies as an "article" in there with the advent of the internet.

It's actually making my exact point that "diversity and inclusion" were mentioned in 0 articles in the 1990s. I'm saying that this is a relevant thing to more than 0% of the population, so there should be representation of that accordingly. And now that we have more articles talking about it, it seems reasonable that some percentage of news articles (above 0) would be discuss these topics.

According to a 2001 poll, nearly 50% of the population drastically over-estimated the black population: https://news.gallup.com/poll/4435/public-overestimates-us-bl...

I’m pretty sure more recent polls show the same thing is true now but I can’t find something more recent so take that with a grain of salt.

Think of one of the 17% of people polled who think 50% of America is black. First, it’s baffling to me to understand how that’s even possible. They must be living in an extreme bubble where they seldom interact with other races. Likely this isn’t even their fault, so how would they ever know to correct it?

Second, if I was one of those people, I would probably think the US is hopelessly racist seeing white people “over-represented” in basically every area of life.

I’m curious to hear about your media diet because that has not been the case for me.

Coleman Hughes shares a good perspective on this in his new book. He cites surveys showing that people changed their opinions for the worse regarding racism in america around 2010. This could be explained by an increase in racism or by increased awareness of racism. But he shows it is not based on these things because surveys also show that people significantly overestimate the number of black people killed by police. The rise in media coverage has led them to think that certain events are much more common than they are.

> But he shows it is not based on these things because surveys also show that people significantly overestimate the number of black people killed by police.

What is the proper number of people to be killed by the police that we shouldn't worry about it? (hint: don't answer this question) The fact that people think the number is more than it actually is feels pretty moot when the number is more than zero. It's also more as a percentage of police killings than one would expect if we were just talking about police incompetence. If this has improved in the years since, then I think that's probably a good thing? Hot take, In general I think the police killing fewer people is a good thing.

Agreed. I’ve stopped watching anything recent. Theres a few Apple TV shows that I’ve enjoyed but it’s always so predictable that an engineered and coerced social justice issue is forced in. This is what the theory of equity is about, it goes over and beyond equality and actively helps by increasing exposure, opportunities, resources for historically disadvantaged people communities groups.

I wish we could stop making everything into a war and fight and just let things speak for themselves. Show don’t tell.

Lately I have been working in DEI committees to better understand. I believe in helping the poor and marginalized but having officially reviewed equity theory I feel a bit disgusted with myself.

> Hot take... How many other news sources discuss race?

Heh. If you tune into the AM band you'll hear plenty of guys "discuss race." It'll make you fear for the species, but still.

>> Hot take... How many other news sources discuss race?

Almost all the conservative media outlets and all their pundits do simply because the whole topic has been an arms race for years. Conservatives are finally attempting to sway the popular narrative that race and identity politics are the only thing that determines your future.

They often discuss race within the context of identity politics and the far-left idea that "all white people are racist" versus their notion that race doesn't determine who you are, how smart you are and how successful you can become.

Its the age old philosophical idea of determinism vs. free will

Yes, race is a topic that is almost never discussed in 21st century USA.

This person gets it. They read what I wrote. Definitely didn't just respond to a straw man version of what I said. /s

> I think this is an under-discussed topic for how pervasive a problem it is in our country.

The parts of it that are under-discussed are the parts they're still not discussing. The unsolved parts are unsolved as a result of bipartisan unwillingness to solve them.

Example: Historical racism caused black people to lack the generational wealth to own a home. The solution to this is to make home ownership more affordable, i.e. to build more housing and bring down the market price of buying a home. But many of the existing homeowners, who don't want home prices to become more affordable, are Democrats, so this problem is unsolved even in areas like San Francisco under 100% Democratic control.

Example: Parents want their kids to attend schools with smart kids so the other students aren't disruptive and don't require the teacher to slow the pace of the class. The solution to this is to put kids of similar intelligence in the same class, which also helps smart minority students who can get in based on test scores rather than money. But then affluent parents with disruptive or less intelligent kids don't get into the smart class, so they prefer solutions where the metric is parental income (e.g. ability to afford a home in the "good" school district) rather than test scores, and then get to feel good about themselves because even though this result is even worse for poor minority students, they can point to the statistics that minority students from poor backgrounds have lower test scores as a reason to refuse to use test scores and wrap their self-interest in the flag of anti-racism. Then many of those parents are Democrats, and moreover the alternate solution where you break up the "income buys a good school district" system would be things like school vouchers, which are opposed by public school teachers unions because they allow non-affluent parents to choose a private school if it's better, and those unions are a Democratic constituency. So again the problem goes unsolved, even in areas controlled by the people who claim to want to solve it.

So these aren't the problems they spend most of their time talking about, because that would be goring the wrong ox. Instead they talk about identity politics and historical circumstance which cannot be solved because they are just abstract ideas and empty rhetoric instead of anything attached to a reasonable policy proposal that might actually do some good.

This take appears to have been "too hot for HN to handle"

For everyone downvoting, I'd be interested in the proportion of articles that discuss race as a percentage of total articles. If the number is more than the number of black people in America, I'd be willing to consider that we've "overcorrected". But a quick search around the web isn't yielding any clear results on this to me.

20 year listener here. I now listen until they force identity politics in to the subject at hand, then change the channel. In my experience it's much less than 10m, but could be my market too.

I play this game with my XM radio. On First Wave, I listen until they play The Police, then I switch to Lithium and listen until they play Foo Fighters. I cycle back and forth constantly.

what's wrong with FooFighters??? :)

Nothing directly, in fact I want to like them so much. But I was there since the 90s and the stations just over-played them to the point that I began to dislike them.

Sprinkle in climate change, and you'll be down to 5! I may be grading them too critically at this point, but in recent years, it feels like that XKCD about Wikipedia and how all roads lead to "Philosophy." Sometimes, I'll sit there wondering how the leap will be made from some benign story to these anchor topics, but they usually manage. I don't like that predictability at all.

I once tuned in to NPR when they were talking about artificial intelligence, and they were talking about how the seminal figures in the field (e.g. McCarthy) were white men. I reflected that if I had to pick the least interesting possible topic on AI, it would probably be how white the AI researchers were in the 1950s.

I think this is the transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1161883646.

> The Dartmouth conference has become an origin myth... Of course, the origin myth served to empower these men to tell their own story. And it's a story full of erasure... We hear nothing in that origin myth about the relationship that AI has to industrialization or to capitalism or to these colonial legacies of reserving reason for only certain kinds of people and certain kinds of thinking.

(later, same show):

> White men wanted to call themselves universal and produce themselves in the machine.

I mean, seriously?

It’s just odd that they feel the need to explain to their audience most professors, and especially mathematics and computer science professors, in the 1950s were white men. Or that a lot of the funds for the research came from industry or the military.

It’s just not interesting or newsworthy.

> Or that a lot of the funds for the research came from industry or the military.

I think that's interesting and newsworthy. Maybe because we know it already it seems obvious, but a younger generation might not understand how deeply enmeshed the military-industrial complex was (and to some extent still is) in academia.

> to some extent

To every extent, I would counter. It's incredibly rare that a person is currently involved in STEM research at a university and some sort of US Military grant isn't providing at least some amount of funding to it/them.

My university for one allowed students to view comprehensive data about grants provided to research groups (after much internal campaigning), but absolutely refused allowing that data to be accessed by the general public. The reason was obvious when you looked at the data: 70%+ of the bucks came directly from various militaries.

This is very program-dependent. In my department, approximately everyone was funded by NIH, with a few NSF.

It's something you are supposed to learn in history class and there are many, many topics that you should learn from history at some point in your life. A news publication is not a replacement for history class and is probably one of the worst places to get a complete view of history.

> A news publication is not a replacement for history class and is probably one of the worst places to get a complete view of history.

Okay, but is it an okay topic for a history podcast like the one sobellian was apparently listening to?

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510333/throughline

To be clear, I have no problem with history podcasts (especially episodes about computing history), I just think they chose a poor lens for the subject matter. The military-industrial complex's influence on computing? Incredibly germane. But, and this is just how I heard it:

> You know, the most disturbing part of the history of AI for me comes from the fact that these men who were working in artificial intelligence looked at those massive, noisy, hot mainframe computers and saw themselves in it. They looked at them and identified a deep affinity that there was something fundamentally shared between their minds and these machines.

> White men wanted to call themselves universal and produce themselves in the machine.

> I think underneath all of that arrogance and hubris is a real lack of faith in people.

> And what I have always found so shocking about the Turing test is that it reduces intelligence to telling a convincing lie, to putting on the performance of being something that you're not.

> ...And in effect, replace God with science?

To me, it felt as if the piece was dripping with contempt for people that actually started the work on the basis that they were nerds with the wrong identity.

Yeah, I wasn't really endorsing the program, just pointing out that "history doesn't belong in news" is a weird critique (not yours) of a history program.

Yes, there’s a lot of putting words in the mouths of people who are no longer alive and can no longer express their thoughts for themselves.

Highschool history class taught me that America won the Vietnam War, because the teacher was a Nam vet and refused to believe otherwise. You can't count on schools to teach anything more than the biases of the teachers. Some of them are great but many are not.

>We hear nothing in that origin myth about the relationship that AI has to industrialization or to capitalism or to these colonial legacies of reserving reason for only certain kinds of people and certain kinds of thinking.

It must be exhausting thinking like this all the time.

If you can convince yourself that something is a struggle for survival you can sustain it indefinitely. It’s part of our physiology

Studies consistently show that liberals are unhappier and more mentally ill than conservatives. There was even a big Gallup poll about it this month. One of the floated reasons is that liberals tend to think negative thoughts, as you say.

It would be nice if instead of harping on this point they actually told what they think the missing story is.

If they think that AI is missing certain kinds of thinking - by all means tell me what they are concretely. Like i don't know if i buy that lack of diversity in earlier AI research meant that the AI research only allowed certain kind of "thinking" (AI doesn't really match anybody's thinking regardless of race), but i would be interested in a well researched argument that it did and what those other kinds of thinking are.

I think the problem fundamentally is that these stories tend to be platitudes (lack of diversity = bad) but don't actually go deep into what that concretely means. Ultimately i want something that makes me think about the topic in new ways; you need to dig beyond the surface to do that.

>Ultimately i want something that makes me think about the topic in new ways; you need to dig beyond the surface to do that.

You, a person that already knows about this, will never get that from a short segment on a public radio show intended for a general audience that knows next to nothing about it.

It is intended to make that audience think about it differently, because they have not even bothered to think critically about this at a surface level.

The fact that these models (along with every structure in any society) embeds the biases of those that designed them seems to continue to elude so many commenters here though, so it seems they really need to keep hearing this too.

It’s NPR, all their listeners think about these topics obsessively.

Also, the models embeds the biases of all the people who create content on the Internet. The designers biases come in to l look at with the prompt hacks put in place later to prevent the AI from expressing bad thoughts.

None of these data sets are based on "the Internet". They are a specific subset of the internet, and the training and reinforcements are in no way neutral (because that's not a thing).

They embed biases from the training data, which is taken from the internet at large. The models themselves aren't inherently biased. They're just trying to generate the next token or scene. And these models aren't from the 50s, or made by researchers in the 1950s. The models have guardrails added to try and prevent bias (and other deemed harmful content) being generated.

None of these data sets are based on "the Internet". They are a specific subset of the internet, and the training, reinforcements, and guardrails are in no way neutral (because that's not a thing).

I use to listen to NPR for 6-7 hours a day at work, 20 years ago.

In 2024, they are simply a reflection of what modern liberalism has become.

The 2005 version of David Sedaris would practically be considered "right wing" in 2024.

Critical theory and intersectionality have come to dominate all liberal discourse to the level of farce. NPR is just a mirror.

A useful heuristic for measuring news quality is to ask yourself, “Am I more informed about what’s happening or about what people are angry about.”

Like you, I was a life-long listener and donater. I stopped both during the pandemic when I noticed NPR was playing the anger game, like every other outlet, for social media points.

Big context shift for me was realising roughly 2019 that Portal:Current events could efficiently replace 95% of my news scrolling

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

I had no idea this existed. Me likey. Now if I can just get this as an RSS feed....

Same here. Let me know if you find a good solution

https://www.to-rss.xyz/wikipedia/

Here's as close as I got with a bit of fiddling. You may or may not be able to winnow out minor changes using the inverttags parameter []

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?hidebots=1&hidecategoriza...

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=feedr...

https://www.to-rss.xyz/wikipedia/

Interesting. Although I have a growing concern about how much of my knowledge base is informed or misinformed by Wikipedia.

Some other useful things in this department:

https://thenewpaper.co - sends you a daily text message with a short, concise daily news report that is sufficient to be aware of anything major.

https://www.boringreport.org - aggregates news stories on a particular subject from various outlets and produces AI-generated summaries of them with all the clickbaity headlines and other forms of button-pushing removed.

That only covers global news though.

Be careful, Katherine Maher (NPR CEO) was CCO/CEO of Wikimedia Foundation 2014-2021.

She then gave a TED Talk that contains some slippery equivocations about truth, includes the inevitable climate-change jibe, and states the contradiction: "we all have different truths" (she uses the phrase 'personal truth' instead of 'subjective opinion' )...

https://singjupost.com/what-wikipedia-teaches-us-about-balan...

> I grew up listening to NPR, it was always on. Car talk with my dad on the weekends, Prarie home, etc.

Note: These are not NPR shows. They're merely shows that your (and most) local NPR affiliates purchased for broadcasting.

If you think your local affiliate doesn't have enough of these types of shows, let them know! Many local affiliates have wide discretion on the programming.

More details: https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178640915/npr-stations-and-pub...

Car Talk was an NPR show.

Nope. It was a locally produced show that was licensed to NPR.

"Car Talk was originally a radio show that ran on National Public Radio (NPR) from 1977 until October 2012, when the Magliozzi brothers retired."

Source: Wikipedia

I'm laughing at everyone trying to split hairs over Car Talk in this thread. Most long-running programming on PBS were all "locally produced".

> Most long-running programming on PBS were all "locally produced".

And I would split hairs with PBS as well :-)

As I mentioned in a sibling post, NPR shows are things like "All Things Considered". Stuff like "Fresh Air" and Car Talk are not considered as NPR shows - not even by NPR themselves.

> Stuff like "Fresh Air" and Car Talk are not considered as NPR shows - not even by NPR themselves.

So when NPR themselves[1] refer to it as "NPR's Car Talk" in official copy, you're saying that is horseshit? You should write to NPR and let them know they are wrong.

Also this:

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2014/11/03/357428287/tom-magliozzi-popul...

This makes me nostalgic. I wish I could hear Tom weigh in on this discussion, and then hear Ray talk him down from the ledge.

From their 25th year anniversary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6atDT3cmrs

I assumed you were trying to distinguish shows like A Prairie Home Companion, which was distributed by American Public Media, from shows distributed by NPR; and that you were simply mistaken about Car Talk. That would have been a somewhat meaningful point, despite the incestuous relationship between all of these organizations. However, if you're arguing that shows distributed by NPR aren't "NPR shows" unless they are also directly produced by NPR, then you're not only being pedantic, but being pedantic on the basis of a definition that is not widely shared.

NPR's own Terry Gross has described Car Talk in these exact words, "an NPR show".[0] A large part of NPR's mission is distributing shows produced by local affiliates, and no doubt they exercise significant editorial discretion in determining which shows to distribute. For the purposes of this discussion, who cares if a show is produced directly by NPR, or if it is produced by another organizaton using NPR's money and then distributed by NPR?

[0] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/361408028

> NPR's own Terry Gross has described Car Talk in these exact words, "an NPR show".[0]

It's interesting that you invoke Terry Gross as being part of NPR, when NPR actually says otherwise:

> Several programs that NPR distributes are produced by NPR Member Stations, not NPR. These include top-rated news and cultural programs such as Fresh Air with host Terry Gross from WHYY...

https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178640915/npr-stations-and-pub...

NPR shows are things like All Things Considered. Car Talk was produced by an independent affiliate (just like Fresh Air). Yes, I am distinguishing between the two.

If NPR doesn't consider Fresh Air to be an "NPR show", then nor do they consider Car Talk to be an NPR show.

There's a difference between these and things like TV shows. Stuff like The Simpsons is actually a FOX show (as in whatever company makes them is owned by Fox). Whereas NPR never "owned" Car Talk, just as they don't currently "own" Fresh Air. These shows can always choose not to be part of NPR syndication. It's ultimately a licensing deal. They do own All Things Considered.

NPR does not say Fresh Air is "not an NPR show". They say it is produced by a member station. You are then superimposing your own personal definition of "NPR show", which Terry Gross for example does not share, onto that statement.

Fresh Air's X handle is @nprfreshair, and you want to tell me it's not an NPR show?

More importantly: how is any of this possibly relevant to the original conversation?

> NPR does not say Fresh Air is "not an NPR show". They say it is produced by a member station.

They also explicitly say that it is not produced by NPR.

It's not an NPR show in the sense that when the licensing deal expires, Fresh Air can choose not to be syndicated on NPR. It's an independent show that licenses itself to NPR. A show like All Things Considered has no such freedom.

> More importantly: how is any of this possibly relevant to the original conversation?

The original conversation was about how one can influence their local affiliate to change their programming, until someone came and nitpicked about whether NPR owns Car Talk or not.

No, the original conversation was about the perceived decline in quality at NPR. You then popped in to say that it was up to the local affiliates, not up to NPR, because these aren't "NPR shows" (by your own personal definition of that phrase). But regardless of whether we adopt your definition (and forsake the definition that Terry Gross and just about everyone else use), how is a decline in the quality of shows that NPR distributes not their responsibility, given that they can and do choose which shows to distribute?

https://youtu.be/aChiTXPHpCY?si=Y0dp431Kq96peLwl&t=3205

> Car talk is a production of Dewey Cheetah Howe and WBUR in Boston. And even though NPR staffers pass through the stages of denial anger depression and acceptance then go back to denial again whenever they hear us say it this is NPR.

https://youtu.be/1ExBaSRyXEM?si=mszTKyvWhrOU2Ezg&t=3180

> Car talk is a production of Dewey Cheetah Howe and WBUR in Boston. And even though hearing aid salesmen are consumed by guilt whenever they hear us say it this is NPR.

How much less NPR can it be when the hosts say at the end "This is NPR"?

Not sure what your point is. The hosts are clearly pointing out that NPR staffers disagree with them on this point.

You haven't listened to enough of the end credits.

https://www.npr.org/people/2100834/tom-and-ray-magliozzi

In 1977, Tom and Ray were invited to the studios of NPR member station WBUR in Boston, along with other area mechanics, to discuss car repair. Tom accepted the invitation, and when he was invited back the following week, he asked, "Can I bring my brother, Ray?" The rest, as they say, is history. The Magliozzis were subsequently given their own weekly program, Car Talk, which soon attracted a large local following.

In January 1987, then host Susan Stamberg asked Tom and Ray to be weekly contributors to NPR's Weekend Edition and on October 31, 1987, Car Talk premiered as a national program, presented by NPR.

...

Car Talk is produced for NPR by Dewey, Cheetham & Howe and WBUR in Boston. Doug Berman is the Executive Producer.

---

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510208/car-talk

> The Best of Car Talk From NPR

> What are you going to do if two NPR hosts proclaim that you are so friendless you have to hang a porkchop around your neck just to get the dog to play with you? And what if those heartless hosts were your very own uncles? Find out on this episode of the Best of Car Talk.

That's listed under https://www.npr.org/podcasts/organizations/s1 which is "NPR Podcasts & Shows" with "NPR" in the top left corner of the icon.

If you go to Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/7y4fsFiHniACpBxFbvYKzY - this is from NPR and not On The Media (which I also listen to on a public radio station) https://open.spotify.com/show/3ge9HkAgzE1PP6193I1Vet and in https://www.npr.org/podcasts/452538775/on-the-media it is listed in a different organization ( https://www.npr.org/podcasts/organizations/s552 ).

> Car talk is a production of Dewey Cheetah Howe...

Dewey, Cheatum & Howe. It's a joke name like Sillius Soddus or Biggus Dickus.

(edit: I was copying from the auto-generated YouTube transcript)

https://www.cartalk.com/content/history-car-talk

> Nine months after starting with Susan, in the fall of 1987, NPR agreed to launch "Car Talk" nationally. So there we were, following in the footsteps of award programs like "All Things Considered," "Weekend Edition," and "Morning Edition." We, like you, remain entirely mystified and have no idea what combination of prescription medicines brought about a decision like this out of NPR's management. We can only assume that they were looking for some cultural diversity, trying somehow to balance their high quality programming with crud like ours. Stations turned to us in droves - much in the same way that lemmings flock to the sea.

> We discovered pretty quickly that producing a national radio show is a lot of work! Shortly after going national, we decided we needed a staff. That way, our afternoon naps could continue uninterrupted and, when not napping, we could still pursue our CAFE study. (Don't confuse this with the government's Corporate Average Fuel Economy report. Ours is about latte and cappucino in the greater metropolitan Boston area.) So, in 1989, we founded Dewey, Cheatem and Howe.

Wow, I've never heard Cheetah. It's like totally missing the punny. Did you miss half the jokes if you heard Cheetah? Do you hear Tony Danza instead of tiny dancer too?

> Note: These are not NPR shows. They're merely shows that your (and most) local NPR affiliates purchased for broadcasting.

That seems like a pretty fine distinction. If nothing else, NPR makes decisions about which externally produced shows to license. In the end, NPR deserves all the credit / responsibility for what it broadcasts.

It reminds me of the distinction NPR makes (used to make?) between "advertising" and "underwriting". Maybe the distinction was relevant for some legal / regulatory things. But it wasn't relevant for e.g. discussions about whether or not they were subject to "advertiser" pressure on their content.

> In the end, NPR deserves all the credit / responsibility for what it broadcasts.

I think it's more like: In the end, your local NPR station deserves credit/responsibility for what it broadcasts. Not all of the shows they broadcast are NPR shows. There's PRI, for example.

The other thing is that sometimes there are multiple NPR options that could be presented.

EDIT: I checked the schedule of my local NPR station:

The morning/afternoon schedule:

    - Morning Edition (NPR)
    - On Point (seems to be NPR out of WBUR)
    - Here and Now (also NPR out of WBUR - I actually think this one is generally pretty good)
    - Think Out Loud (local production of OPB - really good local interview show, the guy is an excellent interviewer, I wouldn't be surprised if he gets moved up to the national level at some point)
    - BBC Newshour (BBC, of course)
    - The World (PRI - actually a really informative program about events outside the US)
    - All Things Considered (NPR)
    - Today Explained (VOX podcast)
    - Marketplace (APM - informative business show)

So not all are NPR. And in some cases the non-NPR shows are some of the better ones.

> If nothing else, NPR makes decisions about which externally produced shows to license. In the end, NPR deserves all the credit / responsibility for what it broadcasts.

But NPR doesn't broadcast anything - your local affiliate does. And they have complete discretion on whether to broadcast anything NPR gives them.

Yep, many years ago NPR was quite eclectic and a great way to satisfy my curiosity on weekends as a kid or later at my factory job.

Incidentally, it now occurs to me that HN is basically my current replacement. Even if I have zero interest in a linked topic, I’ll often find a comment or discussion that’s enlightening and furthers my perspective of something in a meaningful and positive way.

I treasure this site and the insightful comments I read. It’s one of the last places I’ve found on the internet where someone can bring up a controversial topic and get legitimate responses.

This is an under appreciated statement. Pre-Elon takeover of Twitter, I tried for months to engage in legitimate, argumentative yet constructive conversations. I was met time and time again with reductive, inflammatory, and disingenuous responses. And this was in the infosec community, one that for years was one of, in my opinion, last places on Twitter for that kind of discourse. I quit shortly after.

This might be the first time I’ve heard someone refer to infosec Twitter in a positive light. They were always inflammatory and belligerent and spiteful.

The same crowd has now migrated to ActivityPub. You can find them there still acting the same way today.

Only about computer technology. Other topics here are undistinguashable from the rest of the general Internet.

I dunno, certainly there's much more a norm of politeness here, along with decent moderation.

To contrast, the FT used to have good comments (and still does on really obscure topics) but overall they've gone massively downhill because of the lack of decent norms around thoughtful conversation.

While I do agree to some extent, and I’m grateful for what we have here, I think it’s important to call out that we are largely moderated by the community (flagging, downvoting) and still relatively conservative about what is able to be discussed. Pretty much any controversial concept related to anything going on in USA politics is going to get shut down.

>Pretty much any controversial concept related to anything going on in USA politics is going to get shut down.

Good! USA politics are so ridiculous and toxic, it's better to have a place that's free of all that garbage. However, I don't agree that these discussions get "shut down": I see Americans posting their libertarian, gun-fetish stuff here all the time.

Images of what I imagine to be their yearly performance goals rush through my head as soon as it turns to victim, race, oppression, etc.

"25% of stories uplifting Black voices" etc.

It just seems so forced.

Would “a focus on making sure we also give the conservative angle“ also seem forced?

My opinion is that news coverage and liberal politics should focus less on race and identity, not more. That isn't to say we ignore it, but not every issue in cities and states and countries revolves around identity, and an over-emphasis on it comes off as ideological.

But your position starts from the basis that we were race-neutral to begin with. I think part of the reason that there is an emphasis on "positive black voices" is the belief that the default narrative is implicitly negative toward blacks. So without intention you'll simply perpetuate the negative voices.

For example, would the same people who say "we focus too much on race" view Desantis's policies and opinions as "race neutral"?

>the belief that the default narrative is implicitly negative toward blacks

Well, I disagree with that.

I just said NPR specifically focuses too much on identity politics, and I think Desantis is implementing anti-LGBT, anti-education, anti-freedom and anti-democracy legislation.

I dont support the dichotomy that one must either desire an abundance of identity-based journalism or be blind to the issues minorities face. I think many of the problems this country faces, which may disproportionately affect minorities, can be covered without it being race-based. Poverty, healthcare, education, environment, climate change, foreign policy affect all.

It sounds too much like "So without intention you'll simply perpetuate the negative voices" is "you are either for us, or against us", which has caused the world no end to misery.

Desantis is an idiot that I have zero interest in hearing about.

Unless the person has done something worth mentioning that isn't being mentioned only because of their so called "identity" I've zero interest in hearing about it, and would consider such a discussion to be bordering on racist.

As a counterpoint, I listen to The economist’s coverage of US politics. They often interview people involved with the Democrat and Republican campaigns. And I’ve found some of the interviews fascinating - particularly the republican ones because most of my friends and news are left of center.

For example, one interviewee in the trump reelection campaign said they talk a lot internally about obstruction. And so, the campaign has lined up a bunch of politically aligned people ahead of time to take over key departments in the US government if trump gets re-elected, so trump can change a lot of government policies on day 1. I find that fascinating. No matter your politics, it’s interesting to know that the “opposing parties, taking turns governing in different ways” angle seems to be getting stronger.

Hearing from people I don’t have the opportunity to understand in daily life is exactly what I listen to podcasts like this for. I’m glad this coverage exists.

I disagree. For all the criticism color-blindness gets now, there was a lot of progress from the 70s through the early 2000s that seems to have been forgotten in favor of divisive reporting and social media outrage posts. Just because the post-civil rights color-blind era wasn't perfect doesn't meant there wasn't legitimate progress, and that seems under threat now. Some of it is foreign actors, and some of it's coming from both the extreme right and left. They have amplifiers in social media and have managed to get prominent places of power, so they can forment their social revolutions. I count NPR as one of those now, which is a shame because it used to have good and entertaining reporting.

> But your position starts from the basis that we were race-neutral to begin with

No, it starts from the position that race is not the most important facet of a human being's life.

> So without intention you'll simply perpetuate the negative voices.

Almost none of a person's daily life is dominated by racial issues, except maybe people who specifically work in that field of course, and so very little news would have racial relevance. Going out of your way to use race as a lens on every issue is why it's forced.

>Almost none of a person's daily life is dominated by racial issues

I won't presume to know your race but many americans do not live with such comfort. Studies have documented how race is correlated to outcomes in everyday encounters such as traffic stops, employment interviews, rental applications, health care treatment, and school performance.

that's your religion

> Studies have documented how race is correlated to outcomes in everyday encounters such as traffic stops, employment interviews, rental applications, health care treatment, and school performance.

Traffic stops, employment interviews, rental applications, and health care treatment are not events a single person experiences every day, so even if race was a huge factor in all of them, and "huge" is debatable, this is all besides the point.

But all of those things directly affect their every day lives. Your experience and the assumptions you've drawn are not representative for large swaths of america.

> Traffic stops, employment interviews, rental applications, and health care treatment are not events a single person experiences every day

Really? You don't think the outcomes from those events impact your everyday life?

I don't think folks that focus on race would actually disagree with your first point, it is the goal of every minority to have their minority status not be the dominating force in how they're perceived.

The long game has always been to take some contentious minority status and make it boring and commonplace. An example where you can see the success of the LGBT movement in real time is how "coming out" for gay folks is fading away because it's not some big deal most places anymore. Saying you like girls is trending towards the moral gravity of saying you prefer chocolate ice cream.

And how we got to this point is by making sexual orientation a lens on lots of different issues — gay marriage, sodomy laws, public indecency, access to prep, blood donations, aids treatments,... until people just start to consider their existence by default. You stop having to "advocate" for them.

And in an ironic twist of fate one of the largest contributing factors to lgbt acceptance happening so fast was huge amounts of marketing pushing pretty white people, specifically pretty white femme women as the least offensive gays to raise all ships with the tide. Once you see it you can't unsee it, the same playbook is happening with the trans folks with pretty white trans women and afab enbys.

> Almost none of a person's daily life is dominated by racial issues

I can't say race "dominates" my daily life -- but as a matter of politics it probably ranks #2 after issues directly related to income (mostly taxes). And I can confidently say that almost all of the negative in-person interactions I've had in my life have almost exclusively been because of race.

Why do you think racial politics works so well? Why do Black women align more strongly with racial causes than gender causes? Is it because gender issues aren't really important? Do you think that if there was less identity politics that things would actually be better for minorities? Or would it mostly be better for the majority?

There are frequently better lenses for examining these issues, like culture and socioeconomics. These explain a larger portion of the variance than race in many circumstances. For example, black immigrants from Africa have a very different outlook than American descendants of slavery [1], with black immigrants having higher educational attainment than any other demographic [2] in the US. A similar finding has been observed in the UK [3]. It's true that systemic racism has disadvantaged African Americans even after the Civil Rights movement, but interestingly the income gap is wider for black men than it is for black women [4] indicating there are more factors at play than racism alone since black women face similar amounts of discrimination as black men [5].

That said, I don't discount the impact that both implicit and explicit racism can have. I just think it's important to take a more holistic view rather than falling back on identity as the main causal factor.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/us/slavery-black-immigran...

[2]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/2007/03/18/black-immigrants-c...

[3]: https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2021-10/the_a...

[4]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-inheritance-of-black-...

[5]: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2020/07/black-women-...

> I can't say race "dominates" my daily life -- but as a matter of politics it probably ranks #2 after issues directly related to income (mostly taxes).

I'm sure it does for many, but the question is why does it rank that high? Is it because it materially affects your life, or because of other qualitative, personal reasons that don't have much material impact? You just said that material impact ranks higher than race (eg. income, taxes), so do you think race has a higher material impact on you than foreign policy, or education policy?

> And I can confidently say that almost all of the negative in-person interactions I've had in my life have almost exclusively been because of race.

I'm genuinely curious whether you think a white person in your place would not have had most of the same negative experiences, all else being equal. You said "almost all", so if we put that at 80%, do you really think white people in your same circumstances (education, socioeconomic status, etc.) have only 20% of the negative interactions you experience? Doesn't that seem a bit implausible?

Isn't it also plausible that at least some of those people were already angry at you for other reasons, and then used racial insults because they knew it would anger you in return? Also a shitty thing to do, but it's meaningfully different to say that you had a negative interaction caused by your race, as opposed to a racist insult caused by a negative interaction.

> Why do you think racial politics works so well?

Because human beings are tribal and love defining in-groups for solidarity and blaming out-groups for their problems, justified or not.

> Why do Black women align more strongly with racial causes than gender causes? Is it because gender issues aren't really important?

Yes, most gender issues these days are relatively unimportant compared to historical norms, and shared culture defines in-groups more strongly than gender.

> Do you think that if there was less identity politics that things would actually be better for minorities? Or would it mostly be better for the majority?

I think this is a false dichotomy at the core of identity politics. The most significant objective group that materially impacts literally everyone is class, and identity politics is an excellent tool for destroying class unity. Power intentionally amplifies identity politics to play on people's tribal instincts for exactly this reason.

> so do you think race has a higher material impact on you than foreign policy, or education policy?

Probably so. At least more day-to-day. At the extremes I imagine foreign policy could be huge (if we go to war with China, for example), but even the war with Ukraine/Russia has had little impact on my day-to-day life (that I've noticed).

> I'm genuinely curious whether you think a white person in your place would not have had most of the same negative experiences

Probably not. And to be clear, these aren't small day to day interactions. But major negative interactions I've had in my life. From being put up for adoption because my birth-moms family didn't want her to have a black child (I have this directly from my birth grandmother), to being picked on as the only black kid in my class, to having my fiancée say that her family won't come to our wedding due to race (never got married, so won't know if they'd follow through or not -- but it put an extra strain on the relationship that didn't help).

And these are selected examples where race was explicitly noted as the reason. There's also a bunch where race wasn't noted, but I have strong suspicions. And while this makes me cautious, it doesn't make me disengage because most day-to-day interactions with people are tend toward quite positive.

> Because human beings are tribal and love defining in-groups for solidarity and blaming out-groups for their problems, justified or not.

These tribes are social constructs, as it applies to identity politics. But you're ignoring the fact that real politics have been used against the out-groups. Whether it was slavery, internment camps, home loans, segregation, medical care, etc... Sure you can say, "their just constructed tribes", but when one tribe has used this construct to great advantage -- it won't go unnoticed. And I'm unclear if you're saying it should be ignored or that the advantage gained doesn't exist.

> Probably so. At least more day-to-day.

What's an example of a race-based policy that has been or you think can be realistically enacted that has had or should/will have material benefits?

> From being put up for adoption because my birth-moms family didn't want her to have a black child (I have this directly from my birth grandmother), to being picked on as the only black kid in my class, to having my fiancée say that her family won't come to our wedding due to race (never got married, so won't know if they'd follow through or not -- but it put an extra strain on the relationship that didn't help).

That all sucks and I don't at all doubt that such people still exist, but I'm confused how you think race-based politics would help. To recap, you said that race issues are #2 in your political priorities after material/economic issues, ostensibly because of experiences like this, so what sort of municipal, state or federal policies or laws could be enacted that would help?

> But you're ignoring the fact that real politics have been used against the out-groups.

If identity politics have been used against out-groups, I'm skeptical that you can fix it by doubling down on identity politics in some "opposite" direction.

> And I'm unclear if you're saying it should be ignored or that the advantage gained doesn't exist.

Depends what you mean by "ignored", but to be clear I've been saying a few things:

1. identity politics is a pseudo-zero sum game and divides people who should unite against the people with the actual power.

2. class politics is materially more important than identity politics.

3. groups that have been disproportionately disadvantaged by identity politics, as you point out, are also disproportionately advantaged by a focus on class politics, and this has been born out by studies on the economic impacts of class-focused policies vs. identity-focused policies.

You don't have to ignore history to ally with someone against a common foe.

> What's an example of a race-based policy that has been or you think can be realistically enacted that has had or should/will have material benefits?

The Equal Employment Opportunity Act is an example. Affirmative Action is another example that I have mixed feelings on, but an example nevertheless. Other examples include things like access to voting, typically at a state level.

> but I'm confused how you think race-based politics would help.

Those were personal interactions meant to show where the underpinnings for where racial identity comes from. I don't think there's a policy that would fix those things.

> If identity politics have been used against out-groups, I'm skeptical that you can fix it by doubling down on identity politics in some "opposite" direction.

It's been the only thing that has worked so far. Slavery didn't stop because people suddenly forgot about identity. But rather because there were people who fought against it. The "opposite direction" doesn't mean being "equally racist", but rather not being racist AND mitigating against leverage created by past racism.

> groups that have been disproportionately disadvantaged by identity politics, as you point out, are also disproportionately advantaged by a focus on class politics,

The problem is that once this association is known the in-group fights these class policies too, even if it would've helped them. Aka, Drained Pool Politics. Welfare is a common example of this. Or even healthcare reform. Public school funding another. And if you're not aware of the underlying reason for this it'll be exceptionally frustrating because it will seem like they're going against their own interest.

NPR is the voice of white progressives, even if more of the reporters are minorities. NPR’s audience is disproportionately white.

It’s part of the reason polls show some minority voters shifting towards Trump. They don’t see their opinions and beliefs reflected in white progressivism, even with the surface emphasis on DEI.

Yes

I have started reading the piece by Uri now and it basically confirms what I was imagining.

"He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission"

"Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system."

Pretty much guaranteed that they were trying to hit race/gender quotas.

I always find it on the nose when “diversity” is used to mean “aligned with modern leftist political ideals”. That’s just not what that word means.

If NPR wants actual diversity (of opinion), they should consider tracking the political affiliation of the people they interview in their database. But in my experience, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) never seems to include a diversity of political views. I find that very suspicious.

When we can talk about "a diverse candidate", the word has obviously become untethered from any ordinary meaning.

Read "non-white", "non-straight", and/or "non-male" in place of "diversity" and you will see that it works 100% of the time.

I think you’re right. But that isn’t actually what diverse means. The opposite - lefty non-white, non-straight and mostly non-male people are a specific political group.

I think it’s quite on the nose for organisations to cater to that community explicitly. And the wider population is far more diverse than that.

A news organization that chased “diversity of opinion” would not be a good news organization.

Some opinions are not worth entertaining. If NPR were broadcasting the rantings of flat earthers, Sasquatch hunters, and anti-vax weirdos, it may be entertaining but it wouldn’t be news.

Also: the reason DEI initiatives ignore “diversity of political views” is because that is not a trait you are born with.

> Also: the reason DEI initiatives ignore “diversity of political views” is because that is not a trait you are born with.

Is that true? You're born from your parents[0]. I don't think it's actually much of an important distinction that you would have different socialization if you were adopted. Younger LGBTQ/NB people don't agree with this nearly as much as they used to, for instance. Several of those groups are just things you decide to do.

[0] as the vice president said: https://twitter.com/brownskinthem/status/1712665740069724184

NPR flat out got some stories wrong due to their biases.

Probably. Every news organization gets stories wrong. That’s why reputable news sites issue corrections: https://www.npr.org/corrections/

Everyone does. Even as a baseline of "Things that almost all members of it can agree on", our society is incredibly biased in how it views the world.

So is every other society in history. I'm sure ancient Greeks were convinced that they had it all figured out, too.

Fish don't have a word for water. Spend a significant part of your life immersed in a society with a radically different worldview, and it'll be very clear just how arbitrary team blue/red complaints about bias are.

You don't actually want unbiased reporting. It would be either useless, or make you extremely uncomfortable all the time. You're just unhappy that it's got the wrong bias.

The New York Times is an example of a liberal news organization that does a much better job of checking their biases to get their stories right.

Sure; but its a mistake to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Its true that I don't want any of my news to come from flat earthers. But if all of my news (or all of my friends) share the same set of political biases, I'll end up wrong about important things and unable to connect with people around me.

Its a balancing act. Like every balancing act, you can fail on both sides - by being too open minded (and believing Alex Jones or whatever), or by being too closed minded.

I think if you live in a country where half of the population has some particular view of the world, you're being a bad democratic citizen if you don't take the time to understand that point of view.

I agree, but the solution is to consume a variety of news sources rather than expecting some perfect formula from one.

Hoping that people consume a variety of news sources sounds naively optimistic to me. And when a single news station 100% caters to their audience's biases, you end up in situations like Fox News knowingly lying to their audience over the idea that the election was stolen. (If they told the truth as they saw it, they would have lost viewers. So they chose to back Trump's lie.)

I think its much healthier when news sources actively struggle against the pressure to be an echo chamber. And be self aware enough to know their own biases & make them clear to their readers. I also like hearing the reasonable arguments against their position: "We endorse candidate A, but here are some reasonable criticisms of A that their opponents bring up."

The Economist does this. Other commenters in this thread mention the New York Times does this. Generally, I want to follow journalists who know more about the topic than I do, and can help me see a bigger picture.

> If NPR were broadcasting the rantings of flat earthers, Sasquatch hunters, and anti-vax weirdos, it may be entertaining but it wouldn’t be news.

Surely you can see the difference between airing the view that it's reasonable and expected for the modern IRS to have significantly fewer employees per capita than they did before the advent of computers, and airing the view that autism is caused by Lizardmen.

No?

Computers can do audits and litigate cases now?

Computers remove the need to have an army people to open envelopes and file all of the tax returns of the many millions of people who aren't getting audited and now file electronically, and electronically process payments or tax refunds, and validate the numbers on each tax return against the 1099s and W2s submitted by employers to make sure they match etc. All of these things used to be done by hand and it should certainly not require anywhere near as much labor to do them electronically.

Honestly no, because cuts to the IRS have clearly and blatantly been motivated by lobbying and the desire to make the IRS less effectual at tax collection.

The vast majority of the contemporary debate revolves around the defunding of the IRS's legal team and their ability to hire external council, and the observed fact that they have been pursuing less and less tax cases over time against large companies in particular.

there's a number of reasonable "defund the IRS" arguments I could entertain, such is "tax collection is bad", but the idea that computers simply means the cuts in IRS employees is "reasonable and expected" just ain't so. The cuts were directly agitated for by lobbying groups like CEETA, of which Microsoft is a member, Microsoft having a massive pending IRS tax case.

> Honestly no, because cuts to the IRS have clearly and blatantly been motivated by lobbying and the desire to make the IRS less effectual at tax collection.

The other side of this coin is that every time the IRS audits anyone, they have to incur significant uncompensated costs to deal with the audit even if they've done nothing wrong. Anyone subjected to this obviously and reasonably is not going to like it, and allowing the government to convert all of the efficiency gains from computerization into more staff to impose those costs on innocent people is not inherently the right thing to do.

> The vast majority of the contemporary debate revolves around the defunding of the IRS's legal team and their ability to hire external council, and the observed fact that they have been pursuing less and less tax cases over time against large companies in particular.

How many staff they have and who they target with those resources are two separate issues.

> the idea that computers simply means the cuts in IRS employees is "reasonable and expected" just ain't so.

If they had N employees doing audits and M employees doing clerical work, and now computers mean they only need 10% as many employees to do clerical work, it is completely reasonable to say that they should now be able to do the same work as before with 10% as many clerical employees because that is what happened.

>How many staff they have and who they target with those resources are two separate issues.

They may be two separate issues, but they are two interconnected issues, as with limited legal resources its more profitable to audit average people than to audit the wealthy who can evidently hold you up in court for decades, whereas with more legal resources there's more of an incentive to go after the high-hanging fruit since you'll already have the low-hanging fruit covered and have exhausted their resources already.

It's the "having exhausted their resources already" which is the problem.

Suppose the IRS can audit a thousand small businesses and they recover more from this than their own costs. But at the same time most of the small businesses are innocent, and the audits collectively cost them several times as much as the IRS "profits". This is not a socially beneficial undertaking because the net costs across society exceed the net benefits, even if it has higher margins to the IRS than auditing large companies.

If you specifically want the IRS to target large companies then you can have them do that regardless of whether the margin of that to the IRS is less lucrative than the behavior that imposes more uncompensated costs on smaller businesses.

Maybe give them a collar and throw them a bone in the same legislation? I feel strongly like large companies have successfully lobbied and propagandised to conflate funding the IRS enough to effectually go after their rampant tax evasion with hurting small businesses.

It's not really all that hard to earmark a certain amount of IRS funds to only go after companies over XX size. I think this is actually essential under neoliberalism because one of the fatal flaws of neoliberalism is giving large companies more wealth & power and then expecting to be able to tax that back to fund the welfare state, which generally falls on its face as you've just given large companies all the wealth and power in the world to stop that from even happening. If neoliberalism is to survive as a political ideology and for us to not end up adopting socialism (which is bureaucratic and corrupt and inefficient), it's sort of essential that organisations like the IRS have a decent amount of power and for them to direct that power at large institutions.

New York Times is surprisingly good about this.

Most of their reporting does have a left bias, and of course opinion even more so.

But they do have some serious, thoughtful conservatives in their opinion pages. Like David French and Ross Douthat. And they have reported on controversial issues like the dangers of medically transitioning minors. David Leonhardt points out the places where conservative arguments have facts on their side, like how closing schools during Covid for so long greatly damaged learning outcomes and was a bad decision overall.

It eliminates blind spots that come from only considering views confirming an ideology and thus getting important stories wrong.

Where do you draw the line around what voices need to be included? Conservative politics have moved so far to the right that centric liberal politics is what old conservative politics used to be (because democrats are big tent, and the republicans have been shedding voters due to extremism).

Balance isn't positive or useful when it shifts things further one direction, especially when there's such a massive shift.

Yes and: what ever their pre Trump "conservative" bonafidas, neither French or Douthat land any where near today's mainstream movement conservatives (MAGA).

They have conservative bonafides, no scare quotes necessary. The Republican party mainstream (MAGA) is not attempting conservatism, it is right wing populism. The word "conservative" does not have a new definition, the change has been that it no longer applies to the political party it once did (at least more so).

That’s why they have voices like French and Douthat.

It’s hard to find a thoughtful full on Trump supporter, because his “arguments” don’t lend themselves to thoughtful reflection or analysis.

Indeed. While you might dislike Neo-liberalism, Reagan-ism, or Bush's "Compassionate Conservatism," as Walter Sobchak said: at least it's an ethos.

Trumpism believes in nothing but suborning yourself to Trump's will and needs. Sure there's some vague isolationism and xenophobia, and some pandering to Christian nationalism, but the only consistent policy position is fielty to Trump. That's why there aren't any interesting Trumpist pundits. The House is twisting itself in knots right now because they can't decide what he wants or will tolerate regarding Ukraine funding. A real party with a policy would have an articulatable agenda, probably with some dissenters on this or that, but all the current Republican party can agree on is how great dear leader is, and Democrats are bad.

I don't read the NYT as much as I used to, but I'll be a NYT subscriber for the rest of my life because they're the only media source creating content of quality and depth across such a wide range of American society (and of the rest of the world).

Some of their editorials are nutz but many, on both the left and the right, are exemplars of journalism.

> But they do have some serious, thoughtful conservatives in their opinion pages. Like David French and Ross Douthat.

You do a serious disservice to David French by including him in the same boat as Ross Douthat. Mr. French does often post thoughtful pieces from a conservative viewpoint, but most of what I’ve read from Mr. Douthat is quite the opposite.

Indeed, most of what I’ve read from Mr. Douthat is just a thinly-veiled sermon that paints “liberals” as one-dimensional characters that (along with our whole society) just need to find god. A conservative catholic god, specifically.

Really, he’s a religion columnist masquerading as political commentator. And not a particularly good one, at that.

David French, though, is a decent writer.

Why do you think religion isn’t important enough to be discussed in a major newspaper?

Check out the Matter of Opinion podcast. Douthat is very comfortable engaging in give and take with liberals who have very different views. He presents orthodox Catholic opinions yes, but he’s intelligent enough to understand what’s a good or a bad argument.

I don’t appreciate the conflation of conservative views and religious views, which is my main problem. I never said it wasn’t important to discuss; don’t put words in my mouth.

My other problem is that I just find his writing and rhetoric to be very weak.

Those guys (and Brooks, Stephens) represent a moribund strain of conservatism with zero organic support. They speak for spooks and think tanks, nobody else. They provide diversity in the same way that the Washington Generals play basketball.

I think publications like Unherd, Compact, and of course Taki's Mag have their fingers closer to the pulse. I don't endorse the contents and can't even vouch for the quality of the writing, but it's not an ideological dead-end in the way the NYT, Atlantic, and National Review are.

No, those people represent a common strain of conservative view, they just don't represent a faction which holds much power in either political party at this moment. But don't confuse the power balance of factions within parties as a representation of what views people actually hold. A two party system with first past the post primaries makes it likely that the parties will be controlled by their extreme factions, while most people are disaffected and dissatisfied with their general election choices.

Those other publications do indeed have their fingers on the pulse of the dominant populist faction on the right, just like their progressive counterparts have their finger on the pulse of the populist left. But those aren't the only (or in my view, at all) interesting things to read about.

You're framing unrepentant neoconservatism as some underrepresented moderate alternative that a disaffected middle America is secretly clamoring for. I have not met any normal people who think the way French and Stephens do.

I don't think the words "middle America" or "secretly clamoring" show up in my comment.

It's fine (good, even, IMO) that you disagree with conservatives (I do as well), but that doesn't mean they don't exist. The "normal people" that you've met, or that I've met, are not a good sample of the range of political viewpoints that exist.

The people who voted for Reagan and HW Bush and John McCain - who was way more popular than any current Republican leader, and put up a strong showing against Barack Obama, the most popular politician of our era - and Mitt Romney haven't all died or joined Trump's weird and actually pretty tiny cult of personality. They're still out there stewing about what has happened to the Republican party.

It is strange to me. It seems obvious to me that it would result in more diversity to have say, a latino network with all latino reporters who interviewed latinos, and a different network which was multi-ethnic, and a Fox News like network which was white as heck, than it is to just have the 2nd.

Diversity is implemented in a strangely homogenous way where there is only one monoculture. One correct, diverse way to run such an organisation.

No, but a "We're not taking your tax money anymore" should be forced.

American Fiction satirizes this aspect of modern media incredibly well.

I wonder if it has parallels to the Salem Witch Hunt? If they spend x/2% of their time accusing others of being racist, they must expend x/2% "uplifting blacks" so they cannot be accused of it as well.

I don't listen anymore but still like to use text.npr.org for news, its pretty easy to scan the headlines and mentally filter out most of the social justice pieces (and there are a lot of them).

TBF I don't think NPR is really much different then most other mainstream lefty sources. I think axios is way worse than NPR (a lot of their "articles" are just vibes with really poor evidence, at least NPR still tries to do some traditional reporting).

You may like https://brutalist.report/ - very easy to filter just by changing the URL query too.

Same, and it’s pretty good. Not sure what the complaints are as I only use the text only version.

NPR has been downgraded, intellectually. They follow the rest of the news, discussing the same topics with the same framing as the rest of the media, following whatever hot topic there is at the moment, no matter how trivial. News and discussion is often spoon-fed in bite sized chunks that miss nuance and lack the willingness to go past the headlines to the real meat of the issue for fear of boring less sophisticated listeners. Its become boring, repetitive, and uninformative in the vast majority of the stories I hear on NPR One. It is a sad state of affairs.

A lil game I play is to see how long until a pandering buzzword is said from the time I turn on the radio. Usually T < 3 seconds if not the very first word I hear.

> Almost every piece of reporting is now some kind of soft-outrage human-interest pseudo news.

God yes I hate it! I can listen for 20 minute and not walk away with a single fact or learn anything new.

One time they said that fast food was cheaper than grocery food.

It was so wrong, that I never listened to NPR since.

> One time they said that fast food was cheaper than grocery food.

It often is. I can get a burger and fries at McDonalds for far less than the cost in ingredients to make it myself.

You must be the type to buy ingredients in units of 1 of each and then complain that its more expensive than buying the fast food meal.

No. I never said I actually made that complaint, because I don't. I was just pointing out that contrary to resource_waste's assertion above, fast food can in fact be less expensive than grocery food. It is not a statement of error so egregious as to be worth writing off the content of an entire media organization.

It's a statement, that even if you "well acshually" it hard enough to make it work, is still useless.

Can a particular fast food meal be cheaper than some similar grocery store meal? Yes.

Is a fast food meal cheaper that the maximum cheapness calories per dollar than everything you can get at a grocery store? No.

Will people who hear it hear the second or the first?

> Will people who hear it hear the second or the first?

Definitely unambiguously the first unless they're the ones trying to "well acshually" it. At the point of the second you're not even talking about burgers - the maximum cheapness calories per dollar is a five gallon jug of corn syrup or something.

Have you literally ever been shopping before that wasn't a Trader Joes or a Whole foods?

It boggles my mind anyone can think that fast food is cheaper than grocery store food for the dollar. Its basically on the level of flat earthers to me.

It's hilarious reading these posters fully convinced fast food is cheaper than cooking at home. Actually no it's sad because it shows the culinary poverty mindset so many people live with.

Buy a big package of hamburger buns and put it in the freezer if you must; it'll be fine for a while there. Thaw as you go when you want a burger: bread thaws in no time. Buy a large package of ground beef, super cheap, and segment it, re-wrap it, freeze it in amounts you know you will use when it is thawed. Want a burg? Water-thaw the meat, air-thaw the bun. Pickles are pickles and are always ready. Pre-made condiments last forever. Pull from your evolving collection of veggies OR make sure you swiped some toms and lettuce or whatever on your way home along with other ingredients for further meals because that's called planning ahead.

There, cheapest burgers you can possibly have, and better than fankenfood. It's just... organization.

Even if you're lazy you can buy frozen Bubba Burgers and it still comes out way cheaper than McD's.

And if you're too lazy to do any of that, there are about a million complete meals you could decide on which are both easier and cheaper than making a burger, let alone buying fast food.

Back of the envelope, using prices from safeway.com (in Seattle) I get the cost of a quarter pound cheeseburger being about $2.60. Significant error bars on that, because it's hard to estimate how much onions and ketchup and mustard McDonald's uses, and I'm estimating on the lettuce and pickle slices.

But, in no case would I say it costs more than $3.50 to make a quarter pounder with cheese at home. I'm also assuming the ingredients McDonald's uses are not better than even the cheapest ingredients for sale at an okay grocery store, so I'm just giving them that advantage to make it possible to compare.

The current price of a quarter pounder with cheese at McDonald's looks to be $6.22[1]. So, let's call it twice as expensive.

I didn't even bother estimating the cost of making french fries after that, since there's no way they make up the difference.

[1]https://mcdonaldsprices.com/mcdonalds-prices/

I do not, for the record, doubt that some menu items at McDonald's cost less for them to produce and sell than the equivalent would cost to make at home. I would be VERY surprised if it cost less in the long run to buy all your meals at McDonald's versus making food yourself at home. Even buying ingredients in bulk, McDonald's does have a lot of overhead to pay for and profit to make.

A Happy Meal is frequently sold for $3. YOu're saying to can buy the raw ingredients for a hamburger, fries, apple slices, and juice box for less?

In the sense that a 1lb thing of ground beef plus whatever fillers mcdonalds uses (I believe it's some kind of oatmeal) would probably produce like about 10 happy meals, and a 50lb bag of flour from winco (plus a few tbsp salt and water) would make hundreds of buns, I think you could get it way below $3 / meal. I mean, safeway often has ground beef for a few dollars a pound, that's a lot of happy meals.

In reality, these ragebait articles are written by young people (guessing young men) who have no experience cooking for a family.

Quick search... $3 for pack of 8 hamburger buns

$4 for 2lb ground beef

$3 for 10lb russett potatoes

$4 for four apples

$4 for a 52oz jug of OJ

$18 total for ~8 "Happy Meal equivalents", or $2.25 per meal, so less than the actual Happy Meal, but you need 1. $20 cash to buy the supplies and 2. the time/equipment/knowledge to prepare the meals.

Yes, the headlines are rage-bait, but fast food is still ridiculously inexpensive. Yes, you ca reproduce the fast food at home, or live on rice+beans, for less. But add some quality protein and a pile of fresh veg and the price goes up.

2 lb of ground beef is way more beef than a happy meal. A kids meal patty is only 1/10 of a lb, you've given enough for 20 kids meals.

The rest of your numbers are similarly off: - you are giving each happy meal 1.25 lbs of potato!? - apple serving size is 1.2 ozs - An average apple is 8-10 ozs, 4 apples = 26 happy meals minimum.

You realize how expensive fast food is if you are at all used to cooking at home from scratch all the time.

He's the young man who doesn't cook for a family I was talking about I'm guessing.

My kid is 30. But yeah I’m cooking for two, not four or five.

> You realize how expensive fast food is if you are at all used to cooking at home from scratch all the time.

But cooking from scratch all the time has a time cost, too. Many families are time poor as well as money poor so there's a balancing act to be done.

When I say "cooking from scratch", I specifically mean the super fast and easy stuff. Starting from raw materials doesn't mean you do anything complicated to it.

For the burger example: buying pre-formed burger patties is still massively cheaper. Throwing a pre-formed burger patty from your fridge in a pan and putting it on a bun with a slice of cheese will take you ten minutes. Microwave small potatoes while you fry. You are done. There is no prep, you have made 1 easily washed pan and bowl for potatoes and your plate.

Is it the exact same thing taste-wise as your fast food meal? No, the potatoes aren't fried, sorry. Does it hit all the macro nutrients for far cheaper, and probably less time than even going to the fast food place? Yes.

Bag o'tots and an air fryer solves the "no fries" problem.

Tots > Fries

It does, but that is a highly subjective value that depends on the person in question. You can't just plug in the average wage for someone doing cooking for a living and assume it's meaningful. And you especially can't do that while running a clickbait headline that just straight up says fast food is cheaper without also explicitly and prominently explaining this caveat.

I would download the safeway app. Hamburger buns are $1 usually. Ground beef is $0.99/lb. 10 lbs of russett potatoes makes way more than 8 happy meals. frozen orange juice is like $1 each. This is insanity, and exactly expresses my point above. And if you go to a food bank, it's all free. Most are throwing away entire grocery stores worth of food.

McDondalds Hamburgers have always been 100% ground beef. The hamburger in a happy meal is 1/10th a pound 80% ground beef. So about $0.55 worth of ground beef; the bun is $.33, pickle, onion, ketchup, and mustard - $.05 (probably less but I don't know how to calculate), cheese $.15 (I can't find how many slices are in a large block so I estimated). Potato $.25 (again I'm not sure how many potatoes in a fry but this seems right). Soda - $.01 sugar/flavor, $.05 ice (they are selling Coke products not making the soda directly but even still $.10 is about all soda costs in bulk).

So $1.30 if you buy the food yourself and make it all at home from scratch. Add $.70 for a cheap toy and you have a happy meal (McDonald's buys toys in bulk - you can't get toys for that price unless you are buying thousands)

Above prices are what I'd pay at my local higher priced grocery store online - I can get better deals at other stores but they don't have a good online prices to look up.

> Add $.70 for a cheap toy and you have a happy meal (McDonald's buys toys in bulk - you can't get toys for that price unless you are buying thousands)

Most of the toys these days are cards, but you don't need to buy in that much bulk: https://www.orientaltrading.com/toys-games-and-novelties/nov...

The first one has 144 mini skateboards for 20 cents each.

What about if you add the following: the cost of the time spent preparing the meal. And the cost (mostly time) associated with cleanup- such as driving that leftover oil to the recycling center.

> driving that leftover oil to the recycling center.

Right, because people who don't have money/time to cook real food are definitely doing that. Besides, deep frying is not the only way to cook potatoes.

How long do you think it takes to grill a hamburger patty?

To your second point: This is where exact apples to apples comparison breaks down. The sane home cook skips deep frying at home and associated hassles unless it's a special occasion. Microwave the potatoes or boil. Fast, minimal cleanup, and now it isn't junk food either.

Well, I like deep fried potatoes, that's why I included it. I actually do deep fry my potatoes, straining the oil, re-using it, and ultimately recycling it. None of the alternatives are acceptable to me in terms of flavor or texture. Could you explain in more detail why you think that cooking potatoes not in oil makes it not junk food? (in the sense of, I've looked at a wide range of comparisons and it does not seem like frying in oil magically turns healthy potatoes into cancer daemons).

It takes me about 7 minutes to fry a hamburger patty on my Griddle (to rare!), ignoring the heat-up time and clean-up time. The actual cooking is quite fast. On the other hand, I can end up waiting an hour in line at In-and-Out. So while I agree that it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, the economics articles I've seen that compare bsed on fully loaded costs (to the best that they can) seem to conclude that fast food can be about 10-20% cheaper than grocery.

> it does not seem like frying in oil magically turns healthy potatoes into cancer daemons

well, akshually... https://www.fda.gov/food/process-contaminants-food/acrylamid...

however the main concern with fried potatoes is cardiovascular, not cancerogenic.

frying, roasting, and baking all produce acrylamides. There's a paper from sweden that shows you can even find acrylamides in bread that was cooked at standard temp.

The story of frying and cardio is still ongoing; I've seen several full reversals in the public health field over the past 30 years. It's really painful being a quantitative physical biologist watching the press around papers that when carefully inspected provide little to no evidence supporting their position.

Do you get your McDs delivered to you instantly at no cost? If not, then takes less time to cook than drive to McDonalds, wait in line to make an order and wait for your meal to be cooked.

people trade time for money. Cooking yourself is often a family affair and so a cheap use of the little free time and money a poor person has, it pays back well because a boor person isn't then looking for something else toespendmoney on for entertainment.

I feel like the price of restaurant dining scales linearly to the number of people you're feeding, while cooking at home scales more logarithmically. [1]

If you're feeding one person, I don't know that it's that much cheaper to get stuff from the grocery store compared to just eating Taco Bell every day. If you're feeding 5-6 people, it's absolutely cheaper; I can make two large pizzas at home to feed 6 people for like $8.

Also, where are you finding $3 Happy Meals in the US?

[1] Probably not literally true, but more or less how I think about it.

If you can make feed N people for X, the only reason you can't feed one person for X/N is if you're buying too much of things and throwing them away because they go bad. This can be mitigated by freezing things, accepting eating leftovers repeatedly, making smaller quantities, etc., although indeed it's more difficult.

Yeah but if you have stuff that isn’t freezable, even if you’re ok with eating leftovers, you end up having to buy smaller quantities of stuff else you risk stuff going bad before you eat it. Smaller quantities tend to be more expensive.

For example, I don’t buy milk anymore since I do not remember the last time I have finished a carton. I keep some powdered stuff around because I sometimes use it for cooking, but I don’t buy liquid milk anymore. If I did need liquid milk, I would probably end up buying the smallest quantity of milk available to minimize waste, but they would probably be a much higher per-ounce cost.

That’s what I mean about it scaling logarithmically. If you can buy a higher quantity the prices get much cheaper.

You can always buy evaporated milk

Or freeze it.

https://www.usdairy.com/news-articles/can-you-freeze-milk

I do that occasionally as well. In addition to the dry stuff, that more or less covers any milk need I might have.

My point was that there’s some items that would either lead to waste, or they gotta buy such a small quantity of it that the rate is bad.

> A Happy Meal is frequently sold for $3.

Not anymore. I just checked, a hamburger happy meal at the McD's nearest to my house (i.e. not an abnormally expensive location such as an airport) is $4.49. Extra $0.20 to add cheese. This is for a 1/10 lb hamburger (!). As others have pointed out, I think it's very possible to acquire the ingredients for this for less than that, assuming you can buy enough for 3-4 at once.

> assuming you can buy enough for 3-4 at once.

I don’t think you can make that assumption. For someone living alone, that burger from McD’s may well be cheaper than the equivalent made from supermarket ingredients. When I used to live alone, I stopped buying salad ingredients because they would usually go off in the fridge before I used them all. It was cheaper to eat out.

I think that's partly why stuff like frozen pizza is kind of a meme with single people. Stuff in the freezer can generally keep for years before it really has anything off with it, and even after it starts getting a bit off, it's probably still not going to kill you.

Frozen pizzas can be had for as low as like $3.50 if you get them on sale, and since they keep forever in the freezer there's no reason not to stock up at that point...

I lived not-quite-exclusively on frozen pizza when I lived alone for about a year. It wasn't healthy for me, but it was pretty cheap living, at least in the short term.

Most fresh ingredients last at least a week. What kind of salads are you making that a single person can't finish before they go off?

I was out a lot anyway - lunch with work, dinner with friends, weekend catchups with family and so on. When you live alone, you need to leave the house to socialise. I was only home for meals a few times a week. And I didn’t want salad every time I made food for myself.

So yeah, usually I’d buy salad ingredients, make one salad (or veggie sandwich or something). Then a week later I would take a look in the fridge and notice my ingredients had gone bad. I did this several times before I gave up.

You have to use each chain’s app, now, to get what used to be menu prices. They figured out they could raise menu prices a ton and lots of folks would still pay it, while still keeping poor folks paying them money by providing the app option.

It’s still pretty cheap if you get whatever’s the best option from the deals and freebies they offer in the app, rather than buying whatever you want off the menu.

> You have to use each chain’s app, now, to get what used to be menu prices.

Yes, I used their app. I have kids so I know happy meals used to be crazy cheap. They've gone up substantially in price in the past 3 years.

We used to get McDonald's once in a while as a quick, cheap meal that our kids liked. At some point within the past year or so I realized that it's not actually cheap anymore - I think they've raised their prices more than many competitors. IMO, they are now roughly at the same prices as some much more appealing options, so we don't really go there anymore.

We’re in the middle of moving so normal meals have been rather disrupted. We’ve used a 20 nuggets + 2 large fries deal a few times, about $9 with tax. Feeds three kids and then some.

I see a lot of single-happy-meal deals, but few for multiple, so that’s kinda been our go-to instead. Gotta go with what the app wants you to get. I much preferred when the menu prices were just pretty-good all the time…

Who you calling poor folks!? I make big-tech SWE money and I never order from McDonalds without using the app. I guess I’d actually call it “price sensitive” vs. “price insensitive” which IMHO has only a moderate correlation with income.

Did you check on a delivery app, or in store? App prices will usually be inflated

I used the McDonald's app, creating an order for drive-through pickup (they don't seem to put prices on their website that I could find). So, I believe that should be their regular menu prices. I didn't look at 3rd party websites or apps because of the extra expense.

Just the lowest price in the first row of Google shopping. Admittedly unscientific. Just trying to get a ballpark sense for relative prices.

As noted elsewhere, I’m an empty nester. Cooking for two adults, both of whom are athletic and celiac, so my perception of what’s cheap is WAY skewed. We eat lots of fish, chicken, and fresh produce.

That's factually correct- it is often cheaper to buy the equivalent of a hamburger, fries, and coke at McDonalds, Burger King, or other similar stores, for less than you can buy the ingredients at the supermarket. This is actually a "known thing" which has been factually verified.

I wouldn't stop listening over that.

That's a silly measure, though, and not what anyone actuallywants to know when deciding their eating habits. What matters is amortized dollars per calorie, or maybe dollars per time period, and grocery shopping easily beats fast food on that.

the articles I've seen that provide more detailed analysis typically suggest that you can get more "poor quality calories" from fast food. The real challenge here is most comparisons completely ignore prep and cook time as a cost, but that matters a lot for busy parents who don't have time to make the cheapest possible stew out of the cheapest ingredients.

Fast food bulk-buys, prepares at industrial scale, and automates as much as possible. It's going to be hard to fight against that level of volume discounting.

Fast food isn't poor quality depending on what you get. Fries and soda are bad, but cheeseburgers are not particularly unhealthy. They are low fiber.

Prep time is a real concern, but a vastly more complicated one than comparing dollar amounts. Even if you manage to figure out a fixed dollar cost of prep time, most people aren't in a position to directly trade hours between food prep and making money.

Anyway, as long as we're throwing random cost factors into the air, fast food has much bigger labor, utilities, and real estate costs that their food prices have to cover. And individuals can do pretty well buying bulk if they put in the effort. But we talked about effort already. It's definitely not going to be simple if you want to fully quantify all the tradeoffs, but if you just count dollars, well, there's a pretty wide spread of effort levels where you can beat fast food.

This simply isn't true and you should cite some source for this "known fact". It seems to be a "known fact" passed around by people who "don't know how much anything costs at a grocery store."

Example: A quarter lb with cheese at McD

Average price at a US McDonald's, $6.65: https://www.fastfoodmenuprices.com/how-much-mcdonalds-quarte...

Average price according to USDA for home cooked: $2.17 https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...

Fast food is typically much more expensive than home cooked from scratch and people have very confused ideas about this.

I mean it's a known fact in that there are published articles that calculate the fully loaded cost of a (the most discounted) fast-food meal and compare it to the fully loaded cost of buying ingredients and preparing it.

The economics all look great- about 10-30% cheaper for raw costs- except that the articles also include costs to prepare the meal (time cost, resource cost of fuel) and cleanup (time cost and often more garbage/cleanup).

also, the article that were published were mostly published about a decade ago, when the prices for fast food were a lot lower. This changed in the past few years as fast food prices went up a lot, even more than inflation on basic goods.

I typically don't include citations because nobody is here on hacker news to argue about the finer details of academic studies that carefully control for all the factors, and most of us don't have the time and inclination to read the studies in details to see where the problem lie. Instead, we build generalized models of the world that incorporate a great deal of different data and use those to explain our observations to others. My own model is based on 30+ years of shopping and preparing my own food at home, as well as working in fast food (MCDonald's), talking to franchise owners (always an interesting perspective into how McDonald's works), and regular restaurants.

Note: I live in California, a state with a different economic distribution than any other state in the country (with New York and Texas being the closest comparable states in terms of wealth distribution, relative prices of groceries and fast food, amounts of transportation required to obtain food, etc). Some people I know hunt for their own food- they enjoy the sport and it produces enough meat for a family to eat in a year! Obviously, that's a case where fast food isn't really cheaper.

You can just look at your own grocery store and your local McDs. I also live in CA and for a quarter lb with cheese comparison I looked up:

My local McD's: $6.39 My local Safeway (not a budget option, no sales, you can do better than all of this): 1 1/4 lb beef patty $1.69, 1 slice cheddar cheese $0.37, 1 hamburger buns $0.22 = $2.28, misc condiments are negligible but let's say $0.25 total = $2.53

That's less than half the cost. The time and resources cost of frying that patty in a skillet and throwing it on a bun with cheese and ketchup comes nowhere close to doubling that, it's not even close.

can you add in an estimate of your time spent preparing the food? What about cleanup? It takes me more time to clean my food prep and cook area than actually make food most of the time. And compare that to the time spent waiting in the grocery line/fast food line? What about storage costs- I just threw away a 2-week old pile of nasty ground beef that went bad before we had an opportunity to use it (totally on me, I should have cooked burgers for my kids a couple more nights).

That's what I mean by "fully loaded"- when economists compare things like this, they don't just take the published dollar costs in a single location and compare them. They made a best-effort good-faith attempt at considering all the other costs which lead to a consumer making a decision.

Also, fast food prices shot up in the past few years, faster than grocery prices. Most of the articles about this were written about 10-15 years ago.

I used for cost comparison a pre-formed hamburger patty from Safeway. If it takes you more than 10 minutes to pull this from fridge, heat a pan and fry, something is wrong. You put it on a bun and put things on it and you eat it. There is no prep area to clean. Wash a pan and your plate. This isn't even a scaling issue, this is negligible time and cleanup for anywhere 1 to 4 people. This is a real side by side comparison as a McD's quarter lb also has nothing on it requiring prep.

I understand what you are trying to say about "fully loaded cost". It's also wrong. The fully loaded cost is still much lower for home vs fast. Unless you insist that you really desire specifically something like deep fried french fries, a specific cooking method that is extremely scalable and well suited to restaurant production and very inconvenient at home. But it is emphatically not true that a meal of similar ingredients/macro nutrition (burger and potato) is in general ever cheaper in fast food form.

If you want to promote the myth that fast food is cheaper, you should cite any other source than that you vaguely remember there being articles 10-15 years ago.

> If it takes you more than 10 minutes to pull this from fridge, heat a pan and fry, something is wrong.

Something is wrong, then, because I have to go all the way back to my place to put it on a bun and put things on it and eat it. I don't have to make that commute with fast food.

You two aren't arguing about which is cheaper; you're arguing about which externalities you're willing to ignore.

Literally not being at home to eat home made food is obviously a case where other factors dominate.

However, I really don't think that's the general case people are thinking of when trying to argue that it makes some kind of economic sense for people to eat a fast food diet. The average person does go home at some point, especially so for families.

Or more specifically, it's the claim "I can't go to the grocery store and make this meal for less than a fast food meal", that is absurd.

> you're arguing about which externalities you're willing to ignore

Love this! So many arguments boil down to exactly this!

Unless you're going to otherwise be paid for your time, it is inaccurate to count it as a cost.

Opportunity cost. free time has value.

Waiting for my food at a restaurant is not "free" time.

Talking with friends in my kitchen while cooking (and drinking!) is "free" time.

This is a very "person with lots of leisure and socializing time" perspective.

Time is lost getting "fast" food too. Like, the time to cook a patty in the skillet is the same time as the time waiting through the drive thru. And now factor in burning fuel.

The patty doesn’t get in my fridge unless I put it there… after I’ve gone grocery shopping and picked it up. On the other hand, I pass McDonald’s everyday on the way home from work anyways.

I worked in kitchens for years so I'm not the average home cook but even so I think if you're finding a two week old pile of ground beef in the fridge that's on you. You might have to accept that you are disorganized. A home refridgerator isn't a big place to point your eyeballs at and assess and marshall ingredients. Aside from that, I mean as far as "prep" goes... I hesitate to even use the word prep. Prepping is usually a term used for something more involved. Like if you were making your own ketchup and mustard from scratch, that would be prep and would take time. If you've just got pre-made ingredients ready to assemble into a dish then that's not really prep.

Hamburgers for a family of five with a counter-top mise en place...

Place five buns opened up on a large cutting board (1 minute tops). Squirt your bottled condiments on the buns (1 minute tops). Hand-rip your lettuce, five servings, place on buns (3 minutes tops). Slice tomato rounds for each burger (3 minutes I guess if your knife skills are really bad). Take ground beef and hand-form five patties (5 minutes tops). Cook all five patties at once in a large pan or whatever you use (10 minutes tops - smash them if you want them well done or done fast). Spatula out the patties onto the buns and you've got burgers.

Shouldn't take more than 20 or so minutes really and I even left the cooking part for last so as to not complicate things. What you should really be doing is cooking the burgers WHILE you set up the buns. Personally I could go from all those ingredients sitting visibly in a fridge to five burgers ready to serve in about 10 minutes.

Maybe what we have here with you and with many others in America is just a lack of food knowledge. Home food culture used to be all there was before fast food. Those traditions are lost and everyone's skill in preparing meals at home as atrophied over decades.

I mean I get that there's no more Nana in the kitchen makin the sauce and both parents work but there's so many easy, quick meals that can be made for very cheap if people simply acquired the knowledge and practiced. You don't wanna eat those fast food patties anyways they're probably like half fake with fraudulent filler material or whatever. It's hard to even recreate that lab-researched frankenfood.

> Maybe what we have here with you and with many others in America is just a lack of food knowledge.

This is exactly what's happening. This is why I find it so upsetting to hear a source like NPR mindlessly repeating the myth that fast food is cheaper. People have gotten totally out of touch with basic home economics type stuff and the food industry is all too happy for them to stay in the dark.

I can do a variation on bolognese sauce with ground beef, a few bits of thin sliced onions and finally a dab of tomato pasta sauce. 15 minutes top and done while the pasta cooks.

Cooking at home is just stupendously cheaper. I don't understand how anyone can claim otherwise. I made the switch 3 years ago and the impact on budget was phenomenal.

" It takes me more time to clean my food prep and cook area than actually make food most of the time."

You don't clean as you go? Your area should be clean before and after your work.

But maybe my proficiency comes from starting at a Chinese restaurant at the tender age of 15, back in the 1990s.

What about the time spent driving to/from the fast food joint, waiting in line, waiting for them to give you your order, etc.?

I often eschew eating out because it takes too long.

> What about cleanup?

Put it on the floor and let the dog lick it clean.

> My local McD's: $6.39

Are those menu costs or paid costs?

McDonald's has moved to a model where you get the app and it has valuable coupons that take like 30% off the price that renew every day. Which is part of why the menu costs have gone up.

Menu cost, I downloaded the app to look up the price, I was not offered a coupon.

But the exact same thing applies to the grocery prices I quoted. I gave the non-sale prices from my area's more expensive grocery store, that's what I consider the starting point, you can definitely do better.

The McDonald’s coupons are always available under a menu in the app. You have to know to look for them though. Might be regional but in my area there’s always a 20% off your whole order coupon plus some others that can do even better.

Not to dispute your point that grocery stores also have a lot of coupons and promotions and it’s definitely cheaper than fast food (also grocery store food has even cheaper options like beans, rice, canned goods etc that may not be equivalent to a fast food meal but are vastly cheaper and may not take any real time or effort to prepare).

I see the 20% in my app, but it is for orders above $10 so may not work for a single sandwich order being discussed above. But for 2 people or more, it could be quite useful. Never used this and not a McD regular, but will remember this next time.

> the articles also include costs to prepare the meal and cleanup

So because a contractor makes 500 an hour every burger they make costs 500 dollars. Yeah that sounds plausible. They should be maximalising their economic output and leaving menial labor to others.

I can't speak for every market, but that's absolutely not true in New Zealand. Like... not even close. For the price of one portion of ood at McD's you could make the meal for an entire family.

"it is often cheaper to buy the equivalent of a hamburger, fries, and coke at McDonalds, Burger King, or other similar stores, for less than you can buy the ingredients at the supermarket. This is actually a "known thing" which has been factually verified."

I've worked fast food and grocery stores - the only time a grocery store is more expensive is when you go 100% brand name goods, and even then the price difference in total is a couple bucks.

WELL AKTUALLY

look at the website Efficiency Is Everything. Your 'factually verified' has been debunked in like 100 different fast food studies.

I've been thinking about this recently and articles that make cost comparisons of that sort tend to compare only the cost of ingredients and assume you have the equipment to cook it, the skills to cook it and that your time is worth zero.

I don't know how to come up with good metrics for measuring that but I think currently all such articles are seriously bad because most don't even list their set of implicit assumptions concerning the costs that they are bothering to measure.

Even if you limit the consideration to foods that can be eaten as-is with zero preparation or tools, grocery stores still BTFO of fast food. Anybody saying that fast food is cheap is deranged. You want fried chicken and you don't have a kitchen? The grocery store will sell you 2x as much for the same price as a KFC. If you want a sandwich, you can make a dozen for the same price as one from a sandwich shop. If you can stomach the thought of eating something green, the produce aisle is cheap as dirt. It's an internet meme to say that some people can't afford fresh produce. Absolute horse shit. I can buy a bag of carrots with the change I find on the ground walking to the store. Produce is the cheapest food there is.

If you think all of that is too boring to tolerate, then scrounge up a can opener and the possibilities explode.

You're rebutting something I made zero comment on.

There never seems to be any good way to share my thoughts and get meaningful engagement. I was not suggesting fast food is cheap.

I blog about food somewhat frequently. It has no traction and likely never will have traction, much less engagement.

Sometimes I say a thing on hn and it gets some kind of useful engagement.

I understand your inference given the context, but you are replying to stuff I didn't comment on at all.

This comment sparked a really good debate - one which I am pretty sure I remember seeing on HN before. But what it makes me think of is seeing the parent issue: that accounting can be abused to spin the truth however you want. I really want to go in the meta direction with this and say I wish accounting shenanigans could be identified and labelled as fallacies or at least sneaky tools used for persuasion, just like people are becoming wise to established fallacies like strawman or relative privation.

Does it "cost more" based on calories/dollar, or weight of food, or cooked-meals-per-dollar? (I'm not asking for an answer, thats what everyone below your comment has been arguing about I assume). Are cigarettes "just as addictive" as heroin? Well, it depends on how you measure/define _____. I keep seeing effort wasted in arguments that all point back to the "well, it depends on how you measure it", but to me, the arguments never actually get anywhere and nobody seems to realize that they are playing with movable goalposts.

Same, used to be my default radio and podcast listening, then a few years ago they had a major jump in their style/producers/journalists and just couldn't keep listening anymore.

Their podcasts went from non-fiction stories to advertisements for peoples random cultural book.

I used to love listening to All Things Considered followed by Planet Money every day on my grueling commute home from work. It was my only companion. I haven't turned it on in years.

I mourn the loss. Living in a red area NPR was a much-needed breath of Fresh Air.

In fairness, all that soft-outrageous shit is actually happening.

But yes, turning off the news from time to time is, in general, good for your health.

Some years ago I had a deeply weird conversation with a conservative political operative in my area wherein (among other things) they advanced the claim that liberals had demonstrably and totally won the culture wars, and then proceeded to go totally off the rails. I balked at the notion at the time but as the years have gone by I've come to the sullen realization that they had a point.

There are 8 billion people on the planet. You can fill 24/7 with whatever kinds of stories you wish—-sad, maddening, inspiring, funny, joyful, and outrageous too. It’s pure choice to pick the last one, it’s not in any way forced by reality.

Yeah. I always find it a strong tell when people make statements like “make the world a bit less shitty” or “… in reaction to the horribleness of everything”. The world is no more shitty than it was 40 years ago - but the general public perception of the world seems to have gotten much bleaker.

Like you, I attribute a lot of that to social media. I left Twitter and Facebook a few years ago and my outlook on life got much better. I want my news to be balanced. Not all positive or all negative. I want to be pandered to sometimes, and sometimes challenged on my world views. So I found sources that would give me that.

I totally agree with your comment - you media diet is pure choice. Make it a healthy diet for you.

> The world is no more shitty than it was 40 years ago - but the general public perception of the world seems to have gotten much bleaker.

I'll call bullshit (what is it about a thread on the media that so often necessitates this?).

I don't have an objective measure for shittiness, but in terms of the bleakness of public perception of the world I feel more confident in making a comment: forty years ago, The Day After had just aired.

GenX wasn’t moping around not having sex or kids or fun because they were upset about the state of the world. Even in the freaking blitz they were having more sex and kids and fun than Generation Eeoyore.

I don't know how to comment on how much sex the kids are having these days without sounding like a creep, but if you weren't there, you'll need to take my word that the cold war had its highly bleak moments involving fear of armageddon and the AIDS epidemic, with which nothing today really compares. Today has more ennui and blatant idiocy, perhaps, but we were pretty good at that too.

Perceptions are subjective, though, and in many ways defined by the baseline. When you've been living with constant fear of a nuclear war in the background for 30 years (or for new kids, since you were born), it loses its edge. I'm from the USSR originally, and I remember the shelter drills we had occasionally in the kindergarten - we all had our own tiny gas masks that we had to locate, put on, and then orderly proceed to the shelter. Then there were civic defense classes in school, with diagrams explaining in detail the effects of a nuclear weapon on a city, how far away you have to be to not be exposed to the blast wave and the burns, how deep of a shelter one needs to have to avoid irradiation, how to seal the apartment windows against immediate fallout etc. I can't say that it wasn't depressing, but we didn't panic about it either - it was just a part of life, things being usual, just like they have been when we were born.

OTOH for someone who lived in a world where a full-on nuclear exchange was not considered a serious possibility for decades, suddenly facing this possibility for the first time in their life, panic should be the expected response.

I attended a school assembly in middle school (!) which featured an emaciated woman dying of aids that had gotten from being raped while jogging in a public park.

People weren’t walking around refusing to be teenagers because look at this terrible world we live in. This combination of sanctimonious, depressed, and boring probably hasn’t been seen on this continent since the 1700s in New England.

>GenX wasn’t moping around

Are you for real. They invented moping around.

Forty years ago, Threads aired. Watch it if you dare.

It's not pure choice, though. Because people react stronger to outrage, news tend to focus on such stories, so you end up seeing disproportionally more of them in the feed by default. You have to actively seek out more balanced media if you want that.

So you mean to say it IS choice, which is being exercised to choose outrage-inducing material for profit.

I mean to say that it's not a conscious choice most of the consumers of news media, but yes, it absolutely is a choice by the producers.

The indicator on NPR is one of my favorite podcasts, and doesn't play the outrage games.

And Berliner apparently helped to start planet money, which indicator is a spin off of. That’s almost the sum total of real news that’s still available at npr :(

They have an editorial bent but they still get facts right. Not to mention the invaluable local news that is miles above most other local coverage.

Oh, bullshit. Marketplace is also a great podcast.

Maybe pedantic, but Marketplace is produced by American Public Media[1], not National Public Radio, though you hear it on NPR affiliate stations.

[1] https://www.americanpublicmedia.org/

It is excellent, but it’s distributed by American Public Media, not NPR.

Oh my - that’s a really good point, and I should know better. It’s not like those distinctions don’t come up all the time when taking about public radio.

I live in a very liberal part of America.

Wokeness is not popular with anybody.

20% of America is outraged, 60% is willing to give woke media a try as long is it’s entertaining and not too preachy, 15% gives extra points for “representation” but still wants a good story, and 5% thinks it doesn’t go far enough.

Part of this is generational.

In the workplace, I suspect “representation” is a proxy for age discrimination.

I’ve seen too many old white men pushed aside for much, much, much younger minorities.

Seems like thats happening at NPR.

If you think NPR has fallen - and it has - try following The Economist on Instagram. Talk about a once reputable media outlet losing it's way. Nearly every post feels like they fell asleep next to a BuzzFeed pod.

The Economist has a firewall between its magazine and its social media team. The magazine is still good.

IDK, the articles they post on social are all over the road. More clickbait-y than The Economist-ic.

Stick with Consider This and the NPR News. NPR Politics Podcast is great too. I tend to avoid the opinion stuff since, yes, it's definitely got an overly-lefty outrage-bait angle.

I used to listen to NPR quite a bit after moving to the US, mostly during my commutes. Over the last few years, it has gotten worse and worse. The point where I stopped listening to it and switched to podcasts was when they had someone claiming that office breakrooms were "basically white spaces" where non-white people do not belong (and calling for remote work as the alternative). And the interviewer essentially took them at face value.

Have these people not heard of office breakrooms existing outside of white-majority countries? I would bet that having food together in a communal setting is a team-building and fun activity throughout the world regardless of skin-color. Most likely, this was some young, introverted person who was uncomfortable being in a group and wanted to somehow bring in race into that to justify their viewpoint.

As someone who isn't white, this sort of coddling non-sense is simply infuriating. I do not want to be judged based on what I look like, and platforming/pushing these sort of views does exactly that.

They have become the very caricature of what right-wing news makes out liberals to be.

You've always had narcissistic people make everything about themselves or seeing victimhood everywhere.

However what's new is that as long as claims being made are of a certain type, they are not only accepted uncritically, but in fact trying to challenge them can be dangerous for your employment status. So essentially no one can call BS on their ideas because no dissent on these topics is allowed.

I recall hearing an NPR piece in the past couple months that was discussing how best to handle reparations for slavery. The entire piece clearly came from the conceit that reparations would be good and desirable. All of the expert interviewees supported and spoke favorably of reparations with no counterpoints, the few opponents were extemporaneous "man on the street" interviews. The end effect was an one sided piece almost contemptuously disregarding any opposition. Certainly not a convincing message to the 68% of US adults (including 49% of Democrats) that don't support reparations.

More than the staking a clear political position on the matter, it was the presumption and condescension that was the most off-putting. Far too often their pieces have adopted that tone. With the "right-thinking" guest or guests interviewed by the "right-thinking" host about a issue clearly the listener would agree with too... if they are "right-thinking."

I similarly stopped listening to NPR around 2018, because they really leaned into news commentary with a very one-sided bias. I could no longer stand the preachiness of their newer programming, and it seemed that the more established folks like Robert Siegel and Steve Inskeep got roped into toeing the line as well. I think the Trump era really broke a lot of news sources I previously relied on.

Car Talk with my dad was so fun

Sure. It's a real problen. But that was a verging-on-cover-story part of Berliner's criticism, which was just another crypto-fascist diatribe, of the kind that are currently so depressingly ubiquitious.

It's hard to say how much of that is manufactured outrage and how much is an unsettling new reality. It may not be your reality, but for an increasing number of people quality of life is deteriorating. Not saying you're wrong, just saying that we shouldn't completely tune out everything that doesn't fit our own reality.

> It's hard to say how much of that is manufactured outrage and how much is an unsettling new reality.

There's plenty of unsettling new reality, I'll give you that. And it should be reported on, even if it makes people uncomfortable.

But how is it reported on? There's a difference between "here's the economic reality of 20% of of the population" and "you should be outraged about the economy". And if you listen in order to analyze the way the story is told rather than to hear what the story is about, you can tell which is which fairly reliably.

Much of the left has gone from "we're going to report the stories that happen" to "we're going to report the things we think need to be reported, like poverty" (which is all right, as long as they also report the news), to "we're going to report things so as to make you become politically active on the side that we think you should". That last step is highly problematic. For one thing, once you're that blatantly a cheerleader for one side, can I trust that you're telling the truth about what you're reporting on, or are you distorting it out of all resemblance to reality?

Yeah. There are sooo many good podcasts (so much so that I am still a “sustaining member” of OPB because of all the value they bring me), but if you turn it on in the car at a random time, you’re going to die of boredom.

Is this discomfort with the state of the world? Cause I think the goal is that you feel inclined towards action on that. The state of the world isn't... all good. We've got some serious issues right now. And it seems like a lot of people are complaining that they have to hear about that (I will point out almost no other news station is doing this, so also as a proportion of news this seems kinda reasonable) rather than that others are experiencing the bad things.

It's funny to me because their used to be a conservative take that liberals needed safe spaces to talk about all of this stuff, and when it's actually in the media people don't want to grapple with it. I would bet that the most vocal proponents of changing this dialogue lean conservative as well.

> Is this discomfort with the state of the world?

There are two separate critiques going on:

1. There is a lot of bias in the news coverage.

2. There is a lot more to a radio station than covering the state of the world (news, social issues, etc). There's stuff like entertainment, humor, etc.

A lot of people are arguing about 2 above.

There's always malnutrition somewhere in the world (and yes, in the US). But we don't criticize the existence of movie theaters.

I mean, I listen to a lot of NPR for entertainment/humor/etc... WWDTM, PCHH, This American Life, Planet Money.

If the complaint is about #2, then I don't see it in these NPR shows. So I'm assuming they must be talking about #1. OR, they're complaining cause not all of the newscasters are white (they sampled Garrison Keillor, and the Car Talk guys as their examples)? Either way, feels like more of a problem the listener is grappling with than a problem with the actual content, to me.

I don't think it's the media's place to make us feel inclined to take action. What action, exactly? Progressive, conservative, green, techno-optimist, religious, etc? It's their job to report on whatever is news-worthy, and it's up to viewers what they want to do with that information. I don't agree with pushing agendas disguised as news. That used to be mainly a Fox News and AM-talk radio thing. It's dissapointing to see the rest of media follow suit.

I think I have some bad news for you. The media is incredibly biased with their own agenda. I think the only way you can truly account for that is to make up for it with multiple viewpoints. Maybe LLMs can write truly "unbiased" news articles when they stop hallucinating, but until then I think the best thing we can have is "transparent agendas."

> Maybe LLMs can write truly “unbiased” news articles

“bias” only exists relative to a desired result. There is no such thing as “unbiased”.

(Also, and closely related, LLM’s reproduce the biases of those creating them, and the more control we have over LLM’s, the more closely they will do so.)

It's true that there's big problems and it's true that things should change.

The issue is that the solution that is proposed to the problem is to have more attention to the problem. This result in a virtuous circle where things have to address the problem more and more. It does help address the problem though, it's not falling on deaf ears and it is educational.

This then becomes a kind of noise drowning out other signals. It's the signals that listeners want not the noise.

Is anything actually improved, do people benefit? I would say yes!!

But it's a move away from signal and information towards problem education and political or social messaging.

The virtuous circle can get reinforced by objections to the changes. Objections or "discomfort" are often proof that more changes need to be made. The signal is further reduced and those in change become blind in their virtue. Metrics in how good they are doing are perceived in terms of the messages that are put out not in quality productions. A kind of seige mentality makes it hard to determine the difference between criticism of the content or format and political objections of the added messaging to the content. Both positions become opposition and encourage more of the same.

To me, the change to add more unbiased views or thoughts from the other side seem artificial and miss the actual change in content. It makes things more political and less about life.

> The state of the world isn't... all good

That's true it's fucking amazing! It's so much better then any point in history it's hard to image how far we've come.

Steven Pinker? Is that you?

I guess we can call it then. This is good enough. No reason to improve from here.

We should definitely just live with a perpetual war in the middle east. That seems fine. World Hunger is good enough. Racism is more or less solved. At least it's solved enough for my purposes as a white guy. Climate change will probably be fine as it is.

I'm sorry but "this is better than it's ever been" is less of a defense of the current time period, and more of an indictment of human history.

The Middle East has been in a state of perpetual war for millennia. That's not "fine", but trying to bring long term peace there is utterly futile. When a problem has no solution then it's not really a problem, just a fact to be accepted.

I would actually argue it's strictly worse, because we have gotten terribly effective weapons in the last century.

No one in the ME was killing each other as effectively as they are now. That's a way things are demonstrably worse than "there was war a millenia ago."

I also don't think it's fair to say that the ME has been in a "perpetual war for millenia." Was the ME at war during the crusades? Or was Europe conducting Sieges on them.

The Middle East was at war when the Assyrian Empire conquered its neighbors in the 14th century BC. The Middle East was at war when the Achaemenid Empire conquered its neighbors in the 5th century BC. The Middle East was at war when Jewish tribes rebelled against the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD. The Middle East was at war when the Umayyad Caliphate expanded in the 8th century AD. The Middle East was at war when the Ottomans captured Turkey in the 15th century AD. And so on. Some of those groups managed to commit horrific genocides despite having only primitive weapons. This is all terrible but nothing has really changed and unfortunately there is no realistic prospect of breaking the cycle of violence.

As for outside invasions, the same thing has happened to almost every area of the world. Often multiple times. The Middle East is hardly unique in that regard.

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