Finally we found the background music for the TTY tournament!
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If we have to listen to bad music, I would prefer to get the pain over with quickly, like ripping off a band-aid. (Full disclosure: I am actually a fan of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes.)
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I wasn’t expecting the rise of the machines to begin with the toothbrushes…
Although frankly I’m surprised that so many of these things have even been sold/made. Who buys them? That alone makes me doubt this story.
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I’m less worried about this since I found out we can just eat them: Exploring the eating experience of a pneumatically-driven edible robot: Perception, taste, and texture
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Did you watched Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin?
Did he wear a bow-tie? If not then that wasn’t Tucker 
Then I saw this in an article:
More than anything else, Carlson seemed surprised
So, maybe it was the real Tucker and not a body-double 
Armin Wolf (maybe the most popular Austrian journalist) said it was more like an audience and not really an interview, because important topics like the allegations of Russian war crimes in Ukraine were not touched.
So at this point I don’t think it is worth much of my time.
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IIRC Tucker Carlson himself claimed (in court) to be an entertainer and not a journalist, so I’m not surprised that he basically let Putin repeat his hours long monologue about his revisionist history and his talking points about Ukraine being a fake country that shouldn’t exist as a sovereign nation independent from Russia.
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Ι think that was Alex Jones. 
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Yes, I seem to have mixed that up with a 2020 law suit that Fox News won by argueing that
no “reasonable viewer” would take the network’s primetime star Tucker Carlson seriously.
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Alas some people seem to be failing upwards. Carlson’s career should have ended a looong time ago when he got kicked out of Crossfire after Jon Stewart paid that show a visit. Instead of that he became the showman of a program that became a staple of the network. When he was kicked from that he still went up instead of down, since he is now going around the world interviewing world leaders.
Seems to me that while that one-liner from the lawsuit was surprisingly accurate, what the lawyers (wisely) didn’t mention is how rare are “reasonable viewers” nowadays
Edit:
I just saw that someone uploaded the whole episode in good quality:
A rare piece of blatant honesty in TV history indeed. Previously I had only watched the edited part that was 14 minutes, but I’ll put that in my “to watch” list.
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I read that Fox News is the most popular “news” program in the US, but in the Netherlands the most popular TV news program is from the NOS (a publicly funded news broadcasting company, I’d say somewhat left-leaning) with some 1.5 million viewers on average and the 2nd most popular one is from RTL (a commercial broadcasting company, I’d say right-leaning) with some 1 million viewers on average.
We have a consipracist far-right TV “news” program from ON (also publicly funded, although attempts have been made to stop that funding based on them spreading some racist fake news), but from what I can find, their “news” program only has some 150.000 viewers on average, so I’d say it’s more a niche than anything mainstream.
6 years ago someone on Reddit made this bias chart of media in the Netherlands and I’d say it’s pretty accurate.
(left side is progressive, right side is conservative, upper side is hightly factual, lower side is misleading)
ON is less than 6 years old, so it’s not in that chart, but I’d place it in the lower right corner of that chart.
To be fair, I should probably note that “Telegraaf” in that chart is the most popular newspaper here, while “AD” is 2nd and “Volkskrant” is 3rd.
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I feel like a prep getting ready to move to NL after some possible awful political climate changes in France.
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Well, in our latest elections in november, Geert Wilders’ party PVV became the biggest with 26% of the votes. Note that Geert Wilders is one of 2 political party leaders who endorse ON (the other one being Thierry Baudet). So the political climate may not be much better here at the moment.
Though we don’t know yet if Geert Wilders will be able to form a government coalition and become Prime Minister. Negociations have been going on for a while now. Those negociations are secret, but it seems things aren’t going smoothly, as one of the 4 prospective coalition parties left those negociations this week.
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Well, aren’t they enough to govern without Wilders ?
No, Geert Wilders now has 37 seats in parliament, while those other 3 parties together only have 51 seats. 76 seats are required for a majority coalition.
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I will not argue with what you are saying because it is quite correct.
I want to add to it however, that the most worrying part is not just the viewers, per se, but the people that are on the fringe and watching “clips” or consume “bits of news”, because a network might be serious and factual 90% of the time, but the 10% when it goes full bananas is the times it gets viral.
So, the 90% of the time is nice and dandy, but noone is watching that and the damage is done by the viral non-sense.
I am coming to this from a discussion I had yesterday in facebook when someone from my village wrote seriously and I translate/quote:
… even for the solar panels there are objections for their use, by many people. They say that they are radioactive or carcenogenic and that their usage span is only ten years and that you’d have to throw them in the garbage afterwards.
And it was not a stupid fellow living under a rock that wrote all that. To his credit, when I explained to him that all this is not true and gave him the facts and pictures from solar panel manuals showing him the true expected living time and degradation of the panels, he was shocked by how wrong he was.
However, that doesn’t undo all the damage he had been doing in similar discussions where people couldn’t (or wouldn’t) take the time to look things up and he might have effectively poisoned the well for a lot of people that might have been very keen on installing solar panels or support solar panel installation for public usage. Including himself! First and foremost he was the one harmed by the misinformation, since his house is in a good spot to have some panels, but he thought they were hellish tech out of a fallout game
We have been given a powerful tool - the internet - but let’s face it, a lot of people have not come to terms with how to use it properly yet and actually fact-check this waterfall of information that is being dumped on their heads every day from traditional news and TV, as well as the internet itself.
Edit:
Come to Greece! We are only in the 107th place in freedom of press rankings
Eat this Hungary, we are 30 places lower than you, ha!
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Don’t be so arrogant. They are working on it in Hungary!
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