The flagship big-city / large-state stations will very likely continue to function. The real hit for this action will be in rural regions where alternatives to the local NPR translator station are typically religious stations, right-wing talk, and increasingly Spanish-language programming.
If you've access to streaming media, podcasts, or shortwave, you still do have options.
There are several excellent national broadcasters, with the CBC, BBC, and ABC (Australia) operating in English, or a reasonable facsimile. There are often English-language broadcasts from non-anglophone countries, including France (France-24) and Germany (Deutsche-Welle English service), off the top of my head.
Of course, these will get you international news (and occasionally national stories from the broadcaster's home state), but you're straight outta luck for journalism local to your area. OTOH, NPR and PBS have struggled to deliver that (as has commercial news media) for the past decade or two.
If you've always wanted to learn a foreign language but never quite had the inspiration to do so, a further option is to start listening to non-anglophone country's native programming, whether broadcast (shortwave or Internet streaming) or podcast. There are many excellent options. I'm particularly fond of German radio's programming (Deutschlandfunk and its variants, the federated public broadcasting model might offer some lessons and learnings to PBS and NPR going forward), though there are others on top of that.
I round things out with text-based news, typically major newspapers (e.g., NYTimes, Guardian), or newswires (Reuters is pretty good).
But yes, the state of streaming / OTA / linear-programmed news media in the US is absolutely abysmal.
For an excellent compendium of what early computer discussion networks (or "conferencing systems" as they were often called at the time) were like, as well as a bunch of technical background on the actual data networks and protocols of the time, I'd highly recommend John S. Quarterman's The Matrix, first published in 1989. That is, it predates the World Wide Web, and was only about six years after "The Internet" largely (weasel-word conspicuously noted) replaced "ARPANET" as the designation for the widely-used (amongst university, government, military, and some tech-company) public networking protocol and system based on TCP/IP. Late-breaking news about the effect of computer networks on notable political protests in China are included in the forward.
I'd begun using Usenet at about the same time as the book was published, and can't personally attest to the information jibal's giving, but will vouch that their account is far more accurate than that to which they're responding.
NB: "average" can mean any of three measures of central tendency: the mean (sum/count), the median (middle value), or the mode (most frequently occurring value). All three may be valid choices in specific contexts.
Whilst it's common to interpret "average" as "mean", this isn't strictly accurate or reliable.
The Economist's article errs in failing to distinguish which measure of central tendency is actually meant by "average".
At these scales, several orders of magnitude literally makes no difference.
Hydrogen bomb yields range from roughly 0.1 MT to 100 MT (the full design yield of the Tsar Bomba), or four orders of magnitude. They can be considered equivalent for the purposes of this comparison. The principle warhead of the US ICBM force, the W87 warhead, has yield of ~0.3 to 0.475 MT.
Even at a distance of several tens of metres from your eye, destructive effects would remain significant.
One of the rather curious facts about the Sun is that its net energy emissions, on a unit-mass basis, are roughly the same as a mammalian metabolism.
That is, your body is converting mass to energy (the only way the conversion is possible) through chemical processes (ATP-mediated molecular breakdown in the Krebs cycle) at roughly the same rate that the Sun is converting mass to energy through fusion of hydrogen to helium (modulo some pathway hand-waving).
You'll need far more input chemical fuel (carbohydrates and fats, mostly) than the Sun needs of input hydrogen fuel. But the net energy release rate is roughly equivalent.
The biggest difference between you and the Sun is that it (presumably) weighs somewhat more than you do. So that per-unit-mass conversion is multiplied by a much greater mass.
Your art supplies and time didn't create wealth in the economic sense ("the annual produce and labour of the nation" as Smith defines it, <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_II...>), but a financial asset, in the form of a (presumably) uniquely identifiable durable store of financial value.
This is contrasted with economic wealth in which some inputs (capital, labour, raw materials (themselves generally considered as capital) are transformed into some immediately useful consumable product (say, food or fuel), a durable good (clothing, furniture), a service ("immediately extinguished" in the terms of some economists, but still having potential lasting positive value), or capital which can itself be used in future economic activities (machining equipment used in the manufacture of widebody aircraft, or the aircraft themselves).
All else equal ("ceteris paribus"), the result of creating a novel but valued painting would be the same as that of inflating any other durable store of value: the relative prices of competing assets would fall proportionate to the price of the artwork. Ordinarily the drop is small and the bucket large such that this isn't noticed, but it is the net effect.
David Ricardo is amongst the first economists to deal with the economics of collectibles and durable assets of which I'm aware, e.g.,
Ricardo’s value theory applies only to those commodities that ‘can be increased in quantity by the exertion of human industry, and on the production of which competition operates without restraint’; it is thus not applicable to ‘rare statues and pictures, scarce books and coins, wines of a peculiar quality [...]’ (Works, I, 12)
From The Anthem Companion to David Ricardo, Edited by John E. King, p. 169.
If you've access to streaming media, podcasts, or shortwave, you still do have options.
There are several excellent national broadcasters, with the CBC, BBC, and ABC (Australia) operating in English, or a reasonable facsimile. There are often English-language broadcasts from non-anglophone countries, including France (France-24) and Germany (Deutsche-Welle English service), off the top of my head.
Of course, these will get you international news (and occasionally national stories from the broadcaster's home state), but you're straight outta luck for journalism local to your area. OTOH, NPR and PBS have struggled to deliver that (as has commercial news media) for the past decade or two.
If you've always wanted to learn a foreign language but never quite had the inspiration to do so, a further option is to start listening to non-anglophone country's native programming, whether broadcast (shortwave or Internet streaming) or podcast. There are many excellent options. I'm particularly fond of German radio's programming (Deutschlandfunk and its variants, the federated public broadcasting model might offer some lessons and learnings to PBS and NPR going forward), though there are others on top of that.
I round things out with text-based news, typically major newspapers (e.g., NYTimes, Guardian), or newswires (Reuters is pretty good).
But yes, the state of streaming / OTA / linear-programmed news media in the US is absolutely abysmal.
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