What is the purpose of the hearings that are the culmination of 18 months of investigation of the events around the insurrection on January 6th by the special commission. How much does bias play into the investigation? Are there similarities between the 2016 election and the 2020 election. Is it just a Democratic assault or are there Republicans working with the commission.
If you are interested, you can watch the video about the attack on the capitol that Brian and Colin referenced, here.
A short conversation about the value of face-to-face interaction because we are more polite. When we interact online, whether it is posts, comments or reviews, we are more inclined to use insulting, aggressive or confrontational language.
Brian and Colin discuss the difficulty in identifying the truth. We tend to use our personal experience and ideology to decide whether we acknowledge or deny the value of some piece of information. The focus of this conversation revolves around the data on Hunter Biden’s laptop and whether it should be reported on. We cover the history of the laptop and why it was such a controversial topic in the news leading up to the 2020 election. We discuss why there was so much distrust about the story, why there was a strong backlash against those promoting the story and whether either view was valid.
Returning to the old format of Brian & Colin discussing a topic, they take on the use of graphics in media, how it can help or distort. The motivation for the conversation came from a tweet that Colin shared that consisted of a chart showing the dramatic rise in median income globally and Brian took issue with it. Colin begins the conversation by addressing confirmation bias when we receive information from the media, both in affirming what we already believe and dismissing that which we don’t. Brian discusses the context of the information we receive and how we need to consider very carefully the medium which we want to give the message. Some media are better suited for different messages. They address how we treat content differently when we trust the provider or we don’t.
We look back at a snippet of a conversation when Colin addressed the idea that we should be constantly reassessing to ensure that our intended outcome is being achieved and the we avoid the unintended consequences.
Do social media companies have a responsibility to control the content that we see? Should they be managing the content that is deemed violent, offensive, demeaning or aggressive by the users? Colin & Brian both agree that in our present state, there is too much expectation placed on the social media companies to police the content we are exposed to. Remember when our feed was filled entirely with our friends and family. In the effort to monetize, the social media companies changed that experience. They use behavioral reinforcement psychology to keep us interacting and ultimately are motivated by profits.
We begin by discussing what the goal of social security is so that we can agree on our starting point. The original concept of Social Security in America was to create a financial floor for retirees, disabled and survivors. We look at who is funding the social security program and how they are doing so. The negative aspects of social security is that you do not have access to the money, you family doesn’t get the money if you die and you cannot control the investments. The positive aspects are that you cannot outlive the benefits, it will always pay until you die and the payments increase annually to compensate for inflation. We discuss asset allocation and how social security fits in with a retirement portfolio. Do we need social security to protect people from making bad decisions about their retirement? How do we ensure that people can retire comfortably.
A link to the chart that Colin created to show a suggested retirement schedule and the retirement that it would allow.
Great News! Poverty levels having been dropping for the past 100 years and the situation is continuing to improve around the world. This is a fact that most people either are unaware of or ignore. That does not mean we should announce that the mission has been accomplished but it does warrant acknowledging.
Another fact is that in the US, poverty has decreased until the mid 1960’s and has not changed much since that time even though we have gradually increased the amount of money that we have used to address the issue. Colin addresses the problem of means tested and we discuss the issue of government assistance when thresholds cause the assistance to suddenly disappear.
We consider how much money people need to pay average bills. How much does government complicit in the problem by restricting free markets such as minimizing housing density and rent control?
Left Wing Media, Right Wing Media, it is all biased. How do we find good sources of information? What can we do about the bias problem? What about non-traditional media platforms? And how biased is too biased? We discuss all of this and more.
