GeorgeBMac

cgWerks said:

I'm glad to see this, and I'm been impressed with some of the advances, especially concerning the watch and detection of issues.

But, if they want to make a really big impact, they are going to have to address food/nutrition. I'm not sure how they can do this in a meaningful way. All the fitness stuff is nice, but is a fraction of the problem compared to what we eat (and not a simple/problematic metric like calories!).

tmay said:

GeorgeBMac said:

Marvin said:

GeorgeBMac said:

Marvin said:

larrya said:

I was a big fan of his when he was on The Daily Show.  I watched it religiously.  When I watch now, I feel like his moment has sort of passed.  Maybe I'm better informed now, or maybe the plight of the country feels a lot more serious now, or maybe he's lost a step, but nothing feels particularly insightful, original, or clever anymore.

The Daily Show had a lot of writers behind the scenes including people like John Oliver, Colbert:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Daily_Show_writers
https://www.salon.com/2012/12/11/jon_stewart_almost_quit_the_daily_show_because_staff_was_insane/
https://www.vulture.com/2010/09/how_a_daily_show_segment_gets.html

These shows come across like it's the main presenter coming up with the material just like it seems actors in comedy shows come up with their lines but take the quality writers away and there's not enough material.

On his own, Jon Stewart can be insightful about topics he cares about and has thought long about. When it comes to long episodes of current affairs, there needs to be a strong team of writers to come up with a high volume of material.

John Oliver's show suffered the same problem. When he first started on his own after The Daily Show, his show was decent. Then the material started to thin out and eventually they have to resort to slapstick routines and pandering to their core audience bias.

I think the biggest problems these shows suffer from is when they just echo the feelings of their core audience. This is fine for the trained seals that want to clap along but it's empty rhetoric and people get tired of the fake sentiment. It's especially bad when they make it all about mocking the other political side and then their side gets into power because there's a lot less that they want to be critical of.

A lot of people on the Daily Show went separate ways and it diluted all of it. Trevor Noah's show is a trainwreck and the extras from the Daily Show are getting a fraction of the audience each:

https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/daily-show-ratings-plummet-trevor-noah/

The biggest draw comes from the more mainstream hosts like Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Colbert. They do celebrity interviews and this is what people tune in for:

https://www.youtube.com/c/ColbertLateShow/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid
https://www.youtube.com/c/fallontonight/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid
https://www.youtube.com/jkl/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid

Jon Stewart's new stuff is all serious discussion, very little entertainment:

https://www.youtube.com/c/TheProblemWithJonStewart/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid

The trouble is, the more a show swings towards entertainment it loses credibility as a political show. Bill Maher's show is one of the best political shows and it has a strong, durable format that maintains the comedy element. If the others want more viewers, they should either consolidate or add more mainstream segments. I don't expect them to do balanced politics because it's hard to pull that off and with such tribal mentality these days, it's very easy to lose a core audience.

Good points!

I think one that consistently pulls it off is SNL Weekend Update.

They manage to spear everybody, even themselves, with humor:

SNL maintains strong viewer numbers. That's the draw of celebrities and entertainment. Consistently ~4m+ audience over 47 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Saturday_Night_Live_episodes_(season_31%E2%80%93present)#Season_47_(2021%E2%80%9322)

Once a show can pull the audience, they can have whatever political commentary in there and have a broad reach.

Jon Stewart said he left The Daily Show because it became cyclical in sync with the mainstream news and he would rather have had a show like Joe Rogan's that was detached from the news cycle:



He made an interesting comment there about the Daily Show audience expecting the show to change things when it was setup as a comedy show.

His new show seems to be covering topics that were covered a lot on The Daily Show over the years and it looks like it's more about trying to change things than comedy but it's still just a talk show. Talk shows have been covering these topics for over 30 years and politicians have spent their entire lives talking about them but they rarely change anything.

If they are too extreme, the people who need to hear it just tune out. If they are moderate, nobody cares. If they are boring topics, people turn to the entertainers.

The single-topic shows with the audience may not be the right format for Jon Stewart. It doesn't cover enough topics in a given timeframe. He gives more meaningful commentary on the podcasts like the above video similar to how Rogan does it and it gives more freedom to cover any kind of topic that crops up.

tmay said:

Maher is a Libertarian, and Liberals and Progressives are quite aware of that, so we stopped watching him a long time ago. He's also a well known anti-vaxxer.

He has said he's a libertarian a few times but he seems to mistake some qualities like being fiscally conservative and an independent voter with libertarianism. Most wealthy liberal elites (wealthy people in general) are fiscally conservative, they love social causes as long as someone else pays for them. He suggests here that the libertarian movement changed over the years but I think he just found out more about it and agreed with fewer things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpxVEiuxF0Y

Maher is a centrist who aligns most often with liberal values and will have a conversation with anyone and that's more than most people do these days. There's a totalitarian mentality today with an ever diminishing degree of tolerance over disagreement to the point that if people disagree with any of the opinions that someone holds at the present time, the relationship is over. Time to cancel and move to a safer space with more conforming opinions.

Being a centrist can of course result in holding some widely disagreeable opinions. I would say he's more vaccine skeptic than anti-vaxxer. There is a long history of officially approved products being later banned ( https://prescriptiondrugs.procon.org/fda-approved-prescription-drugs-later-pulled-from-the-market/ ) and people who are vegan/vegetarian usually prefer natural alternatives.

Another element is risk factor. People today try to quickly make arguments binary so that they can make a decision about whether to attack or defend and label them pro/anti something. This contradicts being on the side of science. A lot of things in science are not absolutes, especially in medicine and there's a lack of information all round.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/bill-maher-democrats-misinformed-coronavirus

If someone has a 0.6% risk of something bad happening vs 0.02% risk, it's reasonable for them to say that either way it's low risk without someone being abusive about it. But they still need to be informed that this amount of difference in risk can collapse a country's healthcare system because it's not designed to cope with so many people needing treatment at the same time. Maher has been countered on these points on his show because he gives a platform to opposing views.

Regardless of the specific topic, there needs to be more tolerance for conversation. They're just words and ideas and it's how people learn. There is unfortunately an inherent problem with modern platforms with their global scale and how they are delivered because it used to be that once ideas were debated and concluded, people moved on. That doesn't happen so much any more. When ideas are discredited, this no longer has to be acknowledged, the audience can be restricted to the people who agree and the same ideas are spread. Politicians do this all the time now. There's not an easy way to fix this but one thing that would help is to stop trying to cancel moderates because they are most likely to convince extremists on either side to compromise.

"Regardless of the specific topic, there needs to be more tolerance for conversation. "

I think we already went down that slippery slope:  Where, in the lead up to 2016 mainstream media went out of their way to air "both sides of the issue without bias"  -- even while knowing that one side was fact based and the other bullshit.  It became known as "false equivalency" where disinformation and factual information were treated as equals.

KellyAnn Conway said it well when her lies were challenged:  "Those aren't lies.  They're alternative facts"

I think its important to push back against those "alternative facts" -- even if those spewing them turn away.  Because, ignoring them condones them and legitimizes them.

------------------------------------------

"If someone has a 0.6% risk of something bad happening vs 0.02% risk, it's reasonable for them to say that either way it's low risk"

First:  It depends on how you look at it:  a 0.6% risk of death over a 300 million population means 1.8 million premature, unnecessary deaths.   Even if the risk is half of that, it means 900,000 die unnecessarily -- which is our current tally.  If an adult sized enemy killed that many Americans we would be at war.   (saying "But it's only 0.3% -- let's ignore it" would not go over well.)

Second, and on the flip side of that:  Our health care system uses statistics like that to sell their services.  That is:  they scare people by telling them that if they don't take this particular pill their risk of death increase by "30%".  What they don't tell them is:   their risk went from 0.1% to 0.13%.

The difference is citing relative risk versus absolute risk.

(Perhaps that's why we think the absolute number cited for the virus are so low - we're used to the inflated relative risk numbers our health care system puts out.)

But, in all of those cases, it's lying by telling part of the truth -- which is always THE best way to lie.

FFS,

You're a Tankie. You support authoritarians and don't actually acknowledge provable facts about human rights violations and militarization.

To you, everything is "alternate facts".

Marvin said:

GeorgeBMac said:

Marvin said:

larrya said:

I was a big fan of his when he was on The Daily Show.  I watched it religiously.  When I watch now, I feel like his moment has sort of passed.  Maybe I'm better informed now, or maybe the plight of the country feels a lot more serious now, or maybe he's lost a step, but nothing feels particularly insightful, original, or clever anymore.

The Daily Show had a lot of writers behind the scenes including people like John Oliver, Colbert:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Daily_Show_writers
https://www.salon.com/2012/12/11/jon_stewart_almost_quit_the_daily_show_because_staff_was_insane/
https://www.vulture.com/2010/09/how_a_daily_show_segment_gets.html

These shows come across like it's the main presenter coming up with the material just like it seems actors in comedy shows come up with their lines but take the quality writers away and there's not enough material.

On his own, Jon Stewart can be insightful about topics he cares about and has thought long about. When it comes to long episodes of current affairs, there needs to be a strong team of writers to come up with a high volume of material.

John Oliver's show suffered the same problem. When he first started on his own after The Daily Show, his show was decent. Then the material started to thin out and eventually they have to resort to slapstick routines and pandering to their core audience bias.

I think the biggest problems these shows suffer from is when they just echo the feelings of their core audience. This is fine for the trained seals that want to clap along but it's empty rhetoric and people get tired of the fake sentiment. It's especially bad when they make it all about mocking the other political side and then their side gets into power because there's a lot less that they want to be critical of.

A lot of people on the Daily Show went separate ways and it diluted all of it. Trevor Noah's show is a trainwreck and the extras from the Daily Show are getting a fraction of the audience each:

https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/daily-show-ratings-plummet-trevor-noah/

The biggest draw comes from the more mainstream hosts like Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Colbert. They do celebrity interviews and this is what people tune in for:

https://www.youtube.com/c/ColbertLateShow/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid
https://www.youtube.com/c/fallontonight/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid
https://www.youtube.com/jkl/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid

Jon Stewart's new stuff is all serious discussion, very little entertainment:

https://www.youtube.com/c/TheProblemWithJonStewart/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid

The trouble is, the more a show swings towards entertainment it loses credibility as a political show. Bill Maher's show is one of the best political shows and it has a strong, durable format that maintains the comedy element. If the others want more viewers, they should either consolidate or add more mainstream segments. I don't expect them to do balanced politics because it's hard to pull that off and with such tribal mentality these days, it's very easy to lose a core audience.

Good points!

I think one that consistently pulls it off is SNL Weekend Update.

They manage to spear everybody, even themselves, with humor:

SNL maintains strong viewer numbers. That's the draw of celebrities and entertainment. Consistently ~4m+ audience over 47 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Saturday_Night_Live_episodes_(season_31%E2%80%93present)#Season_47_(2021%E2%80%9322)

Once a show can pull the audience, they can have whatever political commentary in there and have a broad reach.

Jon Stewart said he left The Daily Show because it became cyclical in sync with the mainstream news and he would rather have had a show like Joe Rogan's that was detached from the news cycle:



He made an interesting comment there about the Daily Show audience expecting the show to change things when it was setup as a comedy show.

His new show seems to be covering topics that were covered a lot on The Daily Show over the years and it looks like it's more about trying to change things than comedy but it's still just a talk show. Talk shows have been covering these topics for over 30 years and politicians have spent their entire lives talking about them but they rarely change anything.

If they are too extreme, the people who need to hear it just tune out. If they are moderate, nobody cares. If they are boring topics, people turn to the entertainers.

The single-topic shows with the audience may not be the right format for Jon Stewart. It doesn't cover enough topics in a given timeframe. He gives more meaningful commentary on the podcasts like the above video similar to how Rogan does it and it gives more freedom to cover any kind of topic that crops up.

tmay said:

Maher is a Libertarian, and Liberals and Progressives are quite aware of that, so we stopped watching him a long time ago. He's also a well known anti-vaxxer.

He has said he's a libertarian a few times but he seems to mistake some qualities like being fiscally conservative and an independent voter with libertarianism. Most wealthy liberal elites (wealthy people in general) are fiscally conservative, they love social causes as long as someone else pays for them. He suggests here that the libertarian movement changed over the years but I think he just found out more about it and agreed with fewer things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpxVEiuxF0Y

Maher is a centrist who aligns most often with liberal values and will have a conversation with anyone and that's more than most people do these days. There's a totalitarian mentality today with an ever diminishing degree of tolerance over disagreement to the point that if people disagree with any of the opinions that someone holds at the present time, the relationship is over. Time to cancel and move to a safer space with more conforming opinions.

Being a centrist can of course result in holding some widely disagreeable opinions. I would say he's more vaccine skeptic than anti-vaxxer. There is a long history of officially approved products being later banned ( https://prescriptiondrugs.procon.org/fda-approved-prescription-drugs-later-pulled-from-the-market/ ) and people who are vegan/vegetarian usually prefer natural alternatives.

Another element is risk factor. People today try to quickly make arguments binary so that they can make a decision about whether to attack or defend and label them pro/anti something. This contradicts being on the side of science. A lot of things in science are not absolutes, especially in medicine and there's a lack of information all round.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/bill-maher-democrats-misinformed-coronavirus

If someone has a 0.6% risk of something bad happening vs 0.02% risk, it's reasonable for them to say that either way it's low risk without someone being abusive about it. But they still need to be informed that this amount of difference in risk can collapse a country's healthcare system because it's not designed to cope with so many people needing treatment at the same time. Maher has been countered on these points on his show because he gives a platform to opposing views.

Regardless of the specific topic, there needs to be more tolerance for conversation. They're just words and ideas and it's how people learn. There is unfortunately an inherent problem with modern platforms with their global scale and how they are delivered because it used to be that once ideas were debated and concluded, people moved on. That doesn't happen so much any more. When ideas are discredited, this no longer has to be acknowledged, the audience can be restricted to the people who agree and the same ideas are spread. Politicians do this all the time now. There's not an easy way to fix this but one thing that would help is to stop trying to cancel moderates because they are most likely to convince extremists on either side to compromise.

crowley said:

mike1 said:

AppleZulu said:

mike1 said:

rob53 said:

It would be better for the tenants if the apartment building installed a fiber gig service without an ISP, that would save them money and headaches dealing with crazy ISPs. It would be even better if each city created their own fiber service, just like my city has. 

Oh great. Another taxpayer funded, poorly run government "service" that is better handled by private enterprise. Because governments at every level have shown that they are able to keep up with technological advances and consumer hardware.

We have now been through an entire generation's worth of the reflexive propaganda trope of "gubmint bad, bidness good."

ISPs, telcom and cable companies are all giant corporations with lumbering bureaucracies. Pick any one of them, combine its name with the words "customer service" in a search box, and you will find endless laments and horror stories that are as bad or worse than any comparable complaints about government bureaucracies. Whether the MBA dogmatists like it or not, broadband internet service necessarily functions as a basic infrastructure utility. 

Government rightfully operates or heavily regulates utility infrastructure because the national economic interest lies with assuring that everyone has equal access to these resources. It is incredibly ironic that the libertarian impulses of folk living in red-state flyover country works hard against their own interests and flies in the face of the fact that, based on purely private-market considerations, they are in an even weaker bargaining position than poor urban folk in deep blue territory. From an ISP's perspective, if there's enough population density, providing cheap service to poor city dwellers is vastly more lucrative than stringing fiber for miles and miles just to hook up a handful of suburban sprawl dwellers or more rural customers, even if those folks are more affluent and can afford to pay a premium over standard full-price. It's the same as the loonies who want to privatize the post office, claiming FedEx is much more efficient, and not considering that sending a birthday card to grandma costs between 40 to 80 times more with FedEx than it does with USPS, depending on where grandma lives.

Likewise, it's ironic that any libertarian-minded person would object to requiring increased competition of ISPs in apartment buildings. The density argument noted above means that apartment buildings naturally lend themselves to greater ISP competition. It's worth stringing the relatively short lines to compete for relatively large numbers of customers. The only reason that doesn't happen is because the apartment building owners prefer to block that competition in order to scrape money from the ISPs by granting 'exclusive access' to those relatively large numbers of customers. ISPs benefit because, rather then competing through price and service for only a percentage of a building's customers, paying a single, hefty tribute to the landlord gives them all the building's customers, with no need to offer competitive pricing to any of them. Landlords win, ISPs win, and screw the tenants. 

Tell us again how is it private enterprise always handles things better?

Oh please.

The big government socialists are out in force here.

Yes, Opening up complexes to multiple providers might be a good thing. Not 100% convinced that property owners should be forced to do so, but I'm open to being convinced. My objection is to just about any government run anything.

Governments at any level do not know how to run a business, struggle to keep up with the latest advances, mire themselves in politics and bureaucracy and eventually become a burden to the taxpayer.

Try riding a German train.  Your little mind will be blown.