I imagine this making more sense if this were framed with the backdrop of living in an authoritarian state, with progressively worsening social conditions.
You can choose to protest (blue button) and if over some threshold of people then conditions reset. Otherwise protestors are killed off, and red buttoners survive, but with increased oppression.
Sorry for bringing the mood down with this topic. I'll go back to playing Papers Please! now.
I'm sorry to bring the mood down somewhat further. But a lot of the successful protests just end up re-rolling the dice instead of improving the conditions, and you actually end up possibly worse off than before. "More like, under new management", as the meme goes.
It takes a period of worldwide prosperity and, perhaps, substantial foreign entanglement to allow revolutions / coups to actually improve the situation of people living through them.
The "news" warns people about impending recessions every single day. You can open up the Stocks app right now and there will be multiple conflicting "articles" on the SP500 having reached its top or bottom.
Other than news about mortgage rates dropping and trends in payrates for various careers, I see almost nothing actionable in the news for 99% of people.
The benefit of media literacy is being able to tell apart issues of import vs false alarms. That career ladders could be changing due to AI; food and oil could spike / be unavailable due to Hormuz so stock up ahead of time; financial risks of BNPL, meme stocks, and crypto; and potential recession due to hiring patterns, AI bubble, private credit - those are not actionable?
I would separate out current events from "breaking news", the latter of which I think is pretty useless for 99% of people living in a developed and safe country.
Trends are important to learn about, but the regular person would be well advised to prepare for emergencies in advance of the emergency.
Most of the stuff you listed is probably covered under general financial education like not going into debt for frivolous purchases or not gambling on investments you know nothing about.
Inclement weather is probably the most pressing thing to know about, but again, you should probably be prepared at home anyway so you're not affected by people clearing out the grocery stores.
I'm looking at nytimes.com right now, and it's pretty much all meaningless in terms of what I am going to do today, tomorrow, next week, or next month. It's entertainment at best, which is fine, if you can mentally handle it. But if it's getting you down, then I see no negative consequence from skipping most of it. Obviously, come time to vote, it's important to be informed, but day to day, spending one's brain cycles thinking about stuff that will not affect them and they will not be able to affect does not seem like a good use of time.
Thanks, nice detailed overview. I've found this sort of info hard to find. There's also this seeming broadcast schedule which I can't follow for the life of me:
I am thinking of calling them just 'LMs' for short, as they come in varying sizes.
Or even AlMs, just to troll the Al moniker, and how they give alms to the rich.
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