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Grandpa's Spells wrote: Tim Ferriss talks about not consuming news as it's usually a time waster, but his endorsing the idea actually makes me want to do the opposite.

Half of Ferriss's stuff is worthwhile. That's why I lie down in the middle of a Starbucks to read the newspaper.

I have not had tv in my house for at least 15 years, probably longer. The tv is not the babysitter and I am not listening to that horseshit in the background all day. I go to some homes and the fuckin thing is on all day long in multiple rooms in the house. What The Fuck! The few things I might occasionally want to see can be got thru netflix, hulu, etc. Like someone already said, the big news will find you one way or another.

So I unsubscribed to all the news feeds on my RSS, I don't watch news at home. I do listen to NPR on my commute, which seems to cover all the bases.

Mis-clicked a CNN autocomplete today, and I'm pretty sure I'm not missing anything super important.

Some of you will be back on the case whenever the next Republican President takes office.

I use news.google.com, but then randomly customize it for odd stuff. So my current list is

- Science
- Space exploration
- Technology (which means computers)
- South Africa
- Djibouti
- Iraq
- Seychelles
- Mars (the planet, but get hits on Mars candy, Veronica Mars and Bruno Mars)
- Chatham Islands (off of New Zealand)
- Volcanoes

I swap things in and out on a regular basis. Had "piracy" for a while. Might put "cryptography" on there now that I think about it.

I consume nearly zero national or broadcast news..get a too much national political stuff filtering through at work. But...due to the nature of the job I consume a lot of local news The local blogosphere has been helpful in this regard, I can just read the reactions and hysterical to get a sense of what people are freaking out about, which is, sadly, more important than what actually happened.

johno wrote:Some of you will be back on the case whenever the next Republican President takes office.

lol, whole lotta truthiness to that

Jezzy Bell wrote:

syaigh wrote:I stopped watching the news with regularity around the time I had my kids. It seemed every day there was something horrible being done to a baby and I couldn't really deal with that very well as a new mother.

This.

Working in emergency services I had already cut back on my news consumption to lessen my stress load, but now that I've had the mini juggernaut I don't watch anything more hardcore than Sesame Street most days. I don't have any coping mechanism for stories about people doing awful things to children.

What she said. And what FC said.

My father spent the last 4 years of his life as a complete TV news junkie. He'd jump around from channel to channel, from national network newscasts to local stuff to "Superstation" TV cable stuff, to FOX, etc, even though they all said about the same things about the same events.

I'd see him every four months or so (visiting him in his retirement community in Arizona), and the transformation over those four years was remarkable and appalling. By the end, I barely recognized the guy who adopted me and turned my life around.

How much of that was the steady news diet, and how much of that was just sunset years depression is hard to precisely judge.

Or maybe it was all the golf he watched. He couldn't play after his hip surgeries, but he loved to watch that shit, and his cable provider had an "all golf" channel.

When people lose mobility and/or give up, TV watching goes way up. That was true for my parents.