As a couple other comments have alluded, we’re the same essential creatures then as we are now. We create, we appreciate beauty, stories, and art. Sometimes it’s hard for me to feel connected to other humans, but stories like this make me feel profoundly connected to humanity. :)
I understand moral arguments but also see how others might not. I think it might be more useful to view this from a societal perspective. Is it to society's benefit to ensure gamblers don't ruin their own lives? To answer that question, what's the cost to society when a gambler ruins their life?
Lost savings means an impoverished individual and potentially an impoverished family and children. These draw support resources from the state and community, are more likely to turn to crime, and are less likely to develop into contributing members of society.
Help me understand the difference between preying on gambling addicts vs preying on gullible old people to get them to buy $500 in apple store gift cards.
Both are scummy but it's not clear how to regulate the latter without huge collateral damage whereas the former is quite straightforward (because there's effectively no societal benefit to begin with).
If we totaly forbid gift cards, which is the huge colleteral damage? If you want to send $500 to John, just write a check in USA or bank transfer in the rest of the world.
House of Dynamite on Netflix is a realistic (at least it feels realistic) look at the modern day equivalent. It’s fundamentally an exciting film but I also enjoyed learning how large scale human/technical systems operate during a nuclear crisis.
I have to wonder what part of me has become jaded to the point that the movie did not feel that intense to me. I won't go into details on why I think this movie isn't intense, but it's too new to spoil anything for those yet to see it.
It's not the same as something like Threads (1984) to me.
This is easily the best, inadvertent advertisement ever for boosting the nation's missile defense capabilities, and it's ironic that it came out of progressive Netflix studios, given that progressives have insisted since the 80s that missile defense is a worthless, impossible ("like hitting a bullet with a bullet") MIC boondoggle. Thanks, Netflix!
It is like hitting a bullet with a bullet. That's become feasible recently, for the same reasons SpaceX is able to land a spacecraft now; computers and sensors got better.
Unlike SpaceX's scenario, though, you've got an enemy involved, with a vested interest in defeating the system. SpaceX would have substantially more trouble landing if the landing ships had decoys and evasive maneuvers. It's probably viable against current North Korea, or "whoops we launched just one". It's probably not ever viable against Russia or China doing a full-on attack.
(In other words, it's like hitting a bullet capable of hiding and making evasive maneuvers with a bullet.)
Iran's attacks on Israel demonstrated this pretty well; some missiles still got through. Interceptors are expensive, often more so than the rounds they're intercepting.
Corporations don't have political leanings, they have market fit. The rest are your prejudices when encountering a product targeted at another consumer category than yours.
not at all realistic, awful movie. somehow even worse than annie jacobsen's book. they would not fire only 2 interceptors, and there is no urgency to retaliate when it is not a decapitation strike
Try Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. From the Wikipedia article [1]: “This therapy focuses on challenging unhelpful and irrational negative thoughts and beliefs, referred to as 'self-talk' and replacing them with more rational positive self-talk. This alteration in a person's thinking produces less anxiety and depression.”
You're misreading those stats. The Census doesn't define "city", it defines "urban" vs. "rural".
My "city" of 5K is considered "urban" according to the 2020 census. There are nearly zero services in this "city", only a couple of restaurants, the largest employer is the school district, and it's surrounded by farms and mountain forests. It takes 15 minutes by car to get to the next town over on a two lane highway.
If you want to get to any real city, you're looking at a 30-45 minute drive at highway/freeway speeds.
So yes, there may be more individuals in "urban" areas, but not all "urban" areas are functionally urban. My "urban city" per the 2020 census is no LA, Austin, or Portland.
I mean 200 million people in the US live in the top 50 metro areas. Sure there's a lot of small cities out there but they don't account for much population.
I see many comments along the lines of, "Good, this is how the market should work" as if displacement is a desirable outcome. Reasoning from first principles, the world we want is one in which we have fewer disaster-prone areas, not more. This would mean lower insurance rates, and fewer instances of displacement. This is a symptom of a deeper problem.
Well, very fair, but we're not solving climate change or reducing the exposure to disasters. Sorry about that, I really would have liked it to happen too.
Maybe we shouldn't treat housing this way. A house gives you shelter and somewhere to sleep at night. I'm not advocating for a chaotic system that forces you to move every year but rather something that gives you options in the case that something does go sideways (i.e. a much bigger housing supply)
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Fix the News yet (https://fixthenews.com/). If you want a weekly boost of amazing news from around the world, sign up for this newsletter!
For example, did you know that in July 2025, 99.7% of new power capacity added in the US was from clean power (led by Texas)? The EU, US, and UK have committed to a $125 billion global fund to protect the Amazon? The US prison population is the lowest it's been since 1992? A new therapy has successfully cleared 100% of metastatic cancers in trial patients? 1 in 8 kids in Botswana were born with HIV in 2001, but that number has dropped to 1 in 100?
These headlines rarely make the mainstream, but they're the ones that bring me the most hope and joy. If you're looking for positive news, you will love Fix the News.
It think these "positive news" approaches are always falling prey to stated vs. revealed preference. People's revealed preference is that they want news about _actual_ events, which is why these positive news approaches always stay niche.
People stated reason for not liking news is the stress, attributing this to the negativity of the news. I think a larger issue is the frequency and transience of the updates, leading to oscillations in peoples understand of situations (similar to the car dealership example in the "Thinking in Systems" book).
Modern news networks are always pushing shallow views of new events (i.e. "BREAKING"). Unless someone explicitly follows up on a story, they were only exposed to the crisis and not the resolution of it. I'd love a network that was "yesterdays news" which waited to publish any news until a broader picture of the situation was understood.
You should read Postman's Technopoly. He critiques "context-free" news as leading to a confused viewership and argues that it's an unexpected consequence of modern news media: trying to give the viewer a fully-coherent understanding of current news simply wouldn't play as well as shallow, quick stories.
This creates a skewed information-action ratio, where people are inundated with information about problems they have no power to influence. Consequently, news is reduced to a form of trivia, and the act of being "informed" becomes a passive— and ultimately meaningless— ritual.
This! I also wish the news would be charged to follow up on their lead stories. It's interesting to read that the US wants to sell TikTok but as soon as it leaves the headlines you have to actively search for any updates - and you're lucky if there are any.
This kind of reporting (breaking, tickers) generates more stress than any understanding and never enables you to form a more complete picture.
Subscribe to a periodical. I got a bit too busy recently but for two years I subscribed to Private Eye (if you're not from the UK you might need to find an alternative) it's fortnightly and they don't put much on their website. They follow up on stories sometimes going back to the 80s or more.
Surprised? An email subscription box with almost zero information, no example publication or past issues for perusal, unknown subscription or payment model, multiple multi-page privacy policies... I'm surprised any of the target audience of people burned out by the shit that most media has become would assume it is legit and not going to burn you in some way.
That's pretty neat. It sounds like a better version of Mark's idea from Peep Show:
Nancy: Bad news, bad news, bad news. Jesus, Jeremy, one bus crash. What about all the buses that made it safely to their destinations, huh?
Jeremy: Yeah! Yeah, this is such bullshit.
Mark: Yes, I suppose the news should just be a dispassionate list of all the events that have occurred the world over during the day. That would be good. Except of course, it would take forever!
The problem with this kind of initiative is that people don't agree on what positive news means. Your selection is very ideologically slanted. People on the right could interpret these news stories as negative. For example:
1. 99.7% of power capacity coming from "clean power" can be interpreted by people on the right as the grid getting more expensive and less reliable in order to solve a climate problem they don't think is real.
2. Countries committing to a global fund to protect the Amazon can be interpreted as using money critically needed at home to bribe South Americans into doing what they should already be doing themselves. If the people who actually live next to it don't care enough to protect it themselves then why should random people in Iowa or Ireland be forced to?
3. The US prison population being low is only a positive if crime is low. If people don't feel safe, then it can be interpreted as a result of not locking enough people up, and positive news would be hearing that the prison population is going up. This claim may not feel positive if you just saw the video of the murder of the Ukrainian lady on US public transport by a known-dangerous dude who just randomly stabbed her from behind for no reason.
A news feed that is only positive news for a conservative would obviously look very different to such a feed designed for liberals.
It's easy even for children and many animals to understand the Golden Rule: treat others like you'd want to be treated. It generally takes an adult to fail to understand it.
It’s all relative. You can share something slightly personal or controversial and see where it lands in the other person’s comfort zone. Then it’s up to you to decide what to do with that info.
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