cathyreisenwitz
Joined 14 years ago
Joined 14 years ago
Algorithms in particular are problematic. And drive most new traffic to news websites.
Noah Smith:
"There is a growing body of careful research establishing causal links between social media and political polarization and extremism. But simply looking at the trend lines is enough to realize how much American society broke in the 2010s when everyone got a smartphone, Twitter, and Facebook. The 2010s are when perceptions of race relations in America fell off a cliff; when people began to perceive much more discrimination against themselves, despite declining discrimination in offline society; when progressives in particular became depressed en masse and started to experience mental health issues on an astonishing scale; and when young Americans started losing trust in their institutions at a rapid rate."
One-fifth of US adults can’t read well enough to compare and contrast information, paraphrase, or make low-level inferences based on written text. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
I mean... a smart person can not understand the system, true. But a sufficiently stupid person cannot understand the system. So, it is a divide between smart people who understand the system on the one hand and smart people who don't along with dumb people who can't on the other.
"the political playing field is often tilted toward agribusiness. For example, the overwhelming majority of farm subsidies flow to the biggest and wealthiest agricultural operations. Less than a quarter of farms with annual incomes less than $100,000 receive any subsidies at all, while more than two-thirds of larger farms do. And, the larger the farm, the more likely it is to receive subsidies. One study found that between 1995 and 2021, the top one percent of farms received 27 percent of the total $478 billion in farm subsidies during this period. A second study showed that 60 percent of subsidies from three major programs—crop insurance, Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage—are given to the top decile of farms. This study also indicated that large farms were more intensely subsidized. For example, the largest 10 percent of farms received an average of $29 per acre in crop insurance subsidies, compared to an average of $12 per acre for all farms. Moreover producers of meat, fruits, and vegetables are almost completely excluded from the core subsidy programs, while commodity crops such as wheat, corn, and soy are heavily subsidized." https://freopp.org/whitepapers/the-challenge-of-rural-povert...