Here in Ljubljana too. I wasn't even fully aware of them, doing something else, but somehow it made me check my phone and there was the news bulletin, only a couple of minutes old.

World Cup results

I think that gets close since you can hear them from the reaction around you, but I don't think it's a equally distributed. You may have regions where the fans are very vocal but you also have a lot of regions where people don't care all that much especially if you are in a region that got eliminated in an early round

I'm in the UK and you simply didn't have that kind of reaction because Anglican church does not care about the pope. I asked my friend group if they've heard there was a new pope elected and their reaction was "what happened to the last one?".

It was on the news but there were no bells ringing etc. Same as in your football example I suppose.

You clearly overestimate the amount of people worldwide interested in golf.

Here in Frankfurt, too, the bells began to ring at the announcement.

The release of a new iPhone.

Probably not as spiritually fulfilling, but the stock market would be an example of that happening at sub-second latencies, every day, all day.

I don't think that counts as communicating to people at all, let alone to as many people.

What about the tickers you see on TV or at Times Square? That’s not communicating?

How many people look at those?

Versus how many people across the world are finding out about the new pope?

The point is how many people are actually receiving this information. Not "could look up on their phone if they wanted".

I used to be a CNBC junkie. Before there was crypto I used to enjoy adopting a penny stock and watching the ticker for it very closely; you can learn a lot about market dynamics when you are trading a stock where you buy $2000 of stock and that is 30% of the volume for the day. (Try $KBLB for a stock where if you think the price is too high or too low you will find that both opinions are vindicated if you wait long enough.)

And that's a million people doing that versus a billion people hearing about the pope.

(very very rough numbers of course)

Also those trades occurring "millions and millions" of times a day as opposed to a new pope every decade or so.

The comparison that I think matters is that the Pope and the Dalai Lama are the best-known religious leaders there are. I mean there used to be Billy Graham and the Ayatollah Khomeini but I think most people would struggle to name the leader of the Methodist church or Nichiren Buddhism or a rabbi of my than local importance.

Is that supposed to affect the comparison? A million trades seen by a thousand people each* isn't impressive, and numbers like that happen in all kinds of situations.

This is about the huge number of people knowing about a single event right away.

* I say a thousand here because even someone glued to every number on CNBC is parsing nowhere near millions of numbers. A much smaller sliver of people will see each of those individual trades.

That's great. Not sure what it has to do with the conversation though?

Nobody is claiming nobody follows stocks.

Prices are about communicating almost more than they are about prices...

Doubt it's even barely comparable.

Stonks go up and down all time, it's not news, and people don't tune in mass from all around the world to watch sp500s chandelier bars.

What I was thinking is that a billion people all around the globe got an involuntary information upload all at roughly the same time.

Being on the street hearing the bells and recognizing what it meant while a huge number of people all around the globe have the same realization at the same time feels somehow incredibly connecting, and not even necessarily at a religious level.

With some exceptions like crisis, not everyone is listening to that.

And it happens every day, all day. It's not discrete information.

That message is sent quickly. But if you're talking about raw eyeballs, not many are reading it.

Pretty sure the US presidential election is on par.

Maybe the exact timing is ambiguous since candidates usually declare victory/admit defeat before all the votes have been counted officially, but still.

Yeah, that exact timing is the whole deal.

The US presidential election is a mess compared to this.

> Pretty sure the US presidential election is on par.

Contested US elections are logistically, a huge mess that takes forever to resolve, and even when the writing is on the wall, everybody waits and hemms and hawws because <some other network hasn't called it yet>, <so we can't call it>. (And that's not even counting the potential faithless electors, a potential coup in the House, conspiracies to commit election fraud directed from the president's office, etc.)

Canadian elections are figured out and their results are broadcast to the world before Western Canada even finishes voting. (Spoilers: It's always all blue starting from Manitoba and going all the way to the eastern fringes of Greater Vancouver.)

They are, of course, utterly uninteresting, with the last one coming and going without even a mention on the front page of Hacker News.

Blue starts at Saskatchewan not MB. Please stop spreading this idea that everyone on the Prairies is analagous to a bible-thumping Albertan. Rural Ontario also goes mostly conservative ; just like every other province, the split is urban and rural. Alberta and Sask buck this trend by having much higher consistent Con representation in the big cties. Manitoba does not. Only 2 Winnipeg ridings went Con and one was due to heavy vote splitting. Northern Mb is a consistent safe riding for the ndp or libs which is unheard of for a rural riding in AB or Sk.

I think you are overestimating that.

Yes the whole world is somewhat curious who the president is but especially in timezones where it's inconvenient to follow that it's more a "we'll read it in the news later" thing.

The fact that a new pope has been elected is an information is information you don't need to look for because it's announced through one of the oldest public announencement systems ( the church bells )

I think you are overestimating the reach of church bells as compared to, say, social media.

Eurovision is quicker.