The News Thread

[Einherjar86]

It's pointless arguing about this. The Atlantic might publish mostly leftist pieces, but it balances this lean by publishing contrarian pieces. It acknowledges its bias, in other words. That's balanced.

 

[CiG]

Being "balanced" is much less important than being open about your partisanship. American media outlets seem to have this strange relationship with false bipartisanship that other countries don't have.

 

[Dak]

https://qz.com/1152461/student-loans-are-ending-for-brown-university-students/

Solid move by Brown university.

 

[Einherjar86]

It's a good headline, but I'd like more specifics in the article. Is Brown simply ending loans conducted through the university, or prohibiting students from receiving all federal loans? And what about private loans? I'd be curious to hear more.

 

[Dak]

It's a good headline, but I'd like more specifics in the article. Is Brown simply ending loans conducted through the university, or prohibiting students from receiving all federal loans? And what about private loans? I'd be curious to hear more.

Beginning next school year, Brown University will eliminate all student loans in its undergraduate financial aid packages, replacing them with scholarships.

Following a $30 million fundraising effort launched in September, Brown administrators announced this week that 2,087 donors contributed toward the goal, and that the school, located in Providence, Rhode Island, plans to raise $90 million more to sustain the scholarship giving.

 

[Einherjar86]

That doesn't answer my question. They'll replace loans in their financial aid with fellowships--but will they still allow students to apply for non-university loans?

When I applied for loans, some were through the school but others weren't.

 

[Dak]

That doesn't answer my question. They'll replace loans in their financial aid with fellowships--but will they still allow students to apply for non-university loans?

When I applied for loans, some were through the school but others weren't.

I assume they can't do anything about application for loans outside of the university. I understood it to mean all charges directly from the school would be covered by the school.

 

[CiG]

Trump to sign directive to send Americans back to moon, eventually to Mars.

 

[CiG]

New York explosion: Suspect in pipe bomb pledged allegiance to ISIS, officials say.

 

[Onder]

What a clumsy terrorist.

 

[Einherjar86]

Being "balanced" is much less important than being open about your partisanship. American media outlets seem to have this strange relationship with false bipartisanship that other countries don't have.

I actually think it's fine for venues to be partisan, but they should be transparent about it. You're right that in America there's a certain fantasy of the nonpartisan publication that just reports "the facts."

Nobody reports "the facts," they all report the fact as filtered (or inflected, or refracted, or perceived, etc.) through a particular perspective. For what it's worth, I don't think The Atlantic poses as a bipartisan venue; but I do think it offsets its primarily leftist perspective with alternative, if not diametric, pieces. It's a way to acknowledge its partisanship, which I was conflating with being balanced, since that's the term of endearment we use when evaluating a media outlet.

But yes, the important thing is that it acknowledges its partisanship.

 

[CiG]

Whenever I hear or see "fair and/or balanced" in conjunction with the media I get a little triggered because I'm reminded of a news outlet that is blatantly right-wing while desperate to chant a nonpartisan mantra.

 

[TechnicalBarbarity]

Ein's commie friend has been punished.
https://conservativetribune.com/nav...tm_content=2017-12-11&utm_campaign=manualpost

 

[CiG]

What do all the Americans in here think of this net neutrality debacle?

 

[CiG]

NASA has Googled the stars -- and found new rocky planets in a 'major discovery'.

- NASA, in partnership with Google, has discovered two new planets orbiting sun-like stars.
- One of the new planets, Kepler 90i, is the eighth planet orbiting its star – making that solar system the only one known to have as many planets as ours.
- Astronomers who study Kepler exoplanet data applied Google’s artificial-intelligence algorithms in the search for more planets.

 

[Satanstoenail]

What do all the Americans in here think of this net neutrality debacle?

They'll have to pay $5 to read anything about it.

 

[Nate Skalman]

Honestly it sounds like they're going to split the net into fast, and slow lanes, like cable TV -lots of good and bad depending on who you are...protesters and political groups are worried they could be censored. Chronic masturbatators are worried it could slow down their porn -although it may speed up their porn if it proritizes the video over the ad....?...it depends on who pays more and just throws the law back to '15 if I'm correct.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I'm skeptical of the doom and gloom scenarios about ISPs creating a billion different sub-plans to nickel and dime everyone, on the basis that there are multiple ISPs in most of the nation, but it's kind of one of those "Wait and see" things. Businesses were sued previously for violating net neutrality, not because they slowed down access to a competitor's website or charged people differently for different data usage, but because they blocked specific protocols like BitTorrent. afaik data caps were brought in as the solution to throttling heavy data use, which people also bitched about, so I imagine the people that will be fucked the hardest will be the chronic pirates, but who knows. I do know that some say that ISPs are lying when they claim the heavy-weight data users put a strain on the system fwiw.

 

[Baroque]

It's not all doom and gloom but i am struggling to see any way at all that this can be good for the consumer. It would be fine if we were still free to choose any ISP we want as we could circa 2001, but now being limited to 2 ISPs in a given area is likely going to cause some problems. Suppose both of those ISPs decide to slowdown or block some streaming or gaming site you like to use. You have no alternative but to put up with it now, in effect this is censoring things you can do with your free time. It could also possibly get out of hand and make some information unavailable to the public. The information you receive being in the decision of corporate hands and not yours is not a good thing.

 

[Einherjar86]

People keep saying that this opens up the free market for internet providers or some such nonsense, but it's not going to do that at all. The big companies still have a strangehold on the market and it's highly unlikely that any efficient provider is going to come along and serve as a viable competitor, especially given that companies like Comcast and Verizon lobby local cities for sole coverage.

I'm not sure it's going to be the dystopian chaos that everyone thinks, but it certainly takes a step down that path. The trust that people have in "the market" to provide the most ease of access to a variety of products and services is really disheartening. In this particular case, I think the safer option would have been to keep neutrality laws in place.