But how am I supposed to get mad at that headline?!
305 karma · joined March 25, 2014
I’m going to suggest that unless you work directly in the news media industry yourself, you too should be paying absolutely no attention to the news.
“It is all Bullshit”, is what Mr. Money Mustache says, “You need to get the News out of your life, right away, and for life.”
The reasons for this are plentiful, from the inherently sucky nature of news programming itself, to the spectacular life benefits of adopting a Low Information Diet in general. But let’s start with the news.
News programs are, with the exception of a few non-profit or publicly funded ones, commercial enterprises designed to turn and maximize profit. Many of them are owned by larger shareholder-owned corporations, most notably Rupert Murdoch’s News corp. The profit comes from advertising, and advertising revenue is maximized by pulling the largest audience, holding their attention for the longest possible time, and putting them into the mental state most conducive to purchasing the products of the advertisers (which turns out to be helplessness and vulnerability).
Another great perspective on this: This Video Will Make You Angry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
If 'hate' is your 'interest', then you can find lots of people with similar hate online.
In the first, I was a temp worker for a P&G re-packaging facility. This means some temp agency was paid $12/hour and they passed on $9/hour to me. The job was backbreaking, in intense heat, and with very strict management rules (e.g. no lunch break, sitting down for even a moment was grounds for being fired).
In the second, I did lawn mowing for individual families for $20/hour. I found them by referrals and networking, and could control my schedule for when I went to do jobs.
This taught me that being creative to find good jobs was super important.
In college, I found a series of high-pay, flexible or comfortable jobs. A few examples:
$1000 for one week's work to hand out 2 pallets worth of coke zero to college students. I was allowed to keep the extras and ended up with a 1 year supply of coke zero for myself and all my friends. Oh, they also gave me coupon for 1,000 free burritos and despite a very diligent effort to hand out as many as humanly possible was left with ~300 burritos and told to just keep them. Qdoba was my primary diet for quite some time.
A job selling cameras on eBay for a camera shot that went out of business. They paid me a 25% commission and had one of the largest private collections of highly collectable cameras (I sold one for $8,000). I only did it for a summer, and probably should have taken a semester off college to just do this full time and could have made enough money to significantly reduce my college loans.
A freelance role, for a German re-insurance company to write white papers for $50/hour and could create my own agenda for what I needed to write, and work whenever I wanted.
The problem is that debt financing is given to people who never should have gotten it in the first place. You should not give loans to such bad investments, not pay off the bad investments while allowing continued issuance of debt.