UnderpantsWeevil
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
- Comment on Wikipeter was the founder of the site in 1993 when he wanted to know more about model trains without having to visit the library 49 minutes ago:
You’ll regularly find a link to a secondary source that contains a reference to a primary source. If you just want generically available historical, scientific, or broadly epistemological knowledge, its great. If you want an on-the-ground testimonial from an eye-witness, it may give you the start of a breadcrumb trail towards your destination.
That said, the bias endemic to Wikipedia is largely a product of its origins - primarily English, western media focused, heavily populated by editors from a handful of global north countries. If you want to learn about the history of a mayoralty in Saskatchewan going back to the 18th century, its a rich resource. If you want to find out the political valence of the major political parties of Nepal or Azerbaijan, you’ll find a much thinner resource.
Some of that is a consequence of the editors (or absence of them) around a particular topic. Some of that is a consequence of the moderators/admins graylisting or outright blacklisting sources. Newer sources - 404media, for instance - aren’t tracked while older sources that have changed management significantly and lost some of their trustworthiness - WSJ, CBS, National Geographic, as recent examples.
- Comment on Wikipeter was the founder of the site in 1993 when he wanted to know more about model trains without having to visit the library 1 hour ago:
jihadists
Arabic word that means “exerting”, “striving”, or “struggling”, particularly with a praiseworthy aim
Curious choice of words.
- Comment on Wikipeter was the founder of the site in 1993 when he wanted to know more about model trains without having to visit the library 2 hours ago:
To a degree. But you also run into the classic XKCD problem of Citogenesis. This isn’t a hypothetical, either.
Had you, for instance, mentioned something you read about your own historical house on Wikipedia in the city’s newspaper, it would now be a cited piece of information that Wikipedia links onto.
There’s also the problem of link rot. When your small town newspaper gets bought up by ClearChannel or Sinclair media and the back archives locked down or purged, the link to the original information can’t be referenced anymore.
That’s before you get into the back-end politics of Wikipedia - a heavy bias towards western media sources, European language publications, and state officials who are de facto “quotable” in a way outsider sources and investigators are not. Architectural Digest is a valid source in a way BanMe’s Architecture Review Blog is not. That has nothing to do with the veracity of the source and everything to do with the history and distribution of the publication.
- Comment on The whole "toilet seat up, toilet seat down" gender debate could be solved by everybody putting the seat and lid down. 3 hours ago:
nsfw
- Comment on The whole "toilet seat up, toilet seat down" gender debate could be solved by everybody putting the seat and lid down. 3 hours ago:
Lots of things don’t make sense when you’re drunk
- Comment on The whole "toilet seat up, toilet seat down" gender debate could be solved by everybody putting the seat and lid down. 4 hours ago:
It’s late, I’m drunk, I barely remembered to get the seat up before doing my business, and I’m used to living on my own.
- Comment on The whole "toilet seat up, toilet seat down" gender debate could be solved by everybody putting the seat and lid down. 4 hours ago:
Certain toilets are on the small size for my… equipment. And I periodically find my dongle touching porcelain. This also results in some backspray which is annoying to clean up.
I’ve found it easier and less messy to piss standing. But I also got a fancy bidet for my wife’s Christmas present years ago. It automates the whole task of opening and closing, does a bit of self-cleaning, and saves us a few bucks on toilet paper month-to-month. So its less of an issue.
- Comment on The whole "toilet seat up, toilet seat down" gender debate could be solved by everybody putting the seat and lid down. 4 hours ago:
We have a toddler in the house. We keep the lid down because it gives us a few extra seconds in case he slips past us into the restroom and wants to splash around.
- Comment on The Wall People 4 hours ago:
Gotta keep the Boy Who Cried Wolf around in case there’s a wolf.
- Comment on The Wall People 18 hours ago:
I have heard the smoke alarm many, many times.
I have never been in a burning bidding
- Comment on The Wall People 18 hours ago:
Misread that as
I don’t have chicken
- Comment on What is with these videos where it's just someone reaction to shit someone else is doing? 1 day ago:
Sadly those numbers aren’t that unbelievable
They’re absurdly unbelievable.
But for the “everyone is stupid except me” crowd, they provide a certain confirmation bias.
- Comment on China Is Banning Tesla-Style Retractable Door Handles Over Safety Concerns 1 day ago:
none of them should have more than a few percent in them
Tesla makes up 2.3% of the S&P 500 and 4.5% of NASDAQ. Then you have business downstream of Tesla - Luminar Technologies sells the majority of it’s LIDAR systems to Tesla, Hertz’s EV fleet is plurality Tesla, Panasonic co-owns Gigafactory 1.
I was more speaking of the lenders who enable Musk’s bullshit like buying Twitter or fucking around with our elections.
They do it so they can be first in the door for future IPOs. JP Morgan has been a close ally of Musk’s for decades. And he’s repaid them with numerous opportunities to resell their debt. The Twitter loan was a small price to pay by comparison.
- Comment on What is with these videos where it's just someone reaction to shit someone else is doing? 1 day ago:
I’ve seen limited evidence to suggest the audience is material. A lot of these numbers are farmed for engagement and to inflate ad revenue. A lot are just channels that auto play when people aren’t paying attention.
There’s definitely an audience of little kids who are just strapped to pads with nothing better to do. But it can’t be overstated how fudged these audience numbers can get
- Comment on If the Bond franchise hadn't been sold to Amazon, it was possible we could have seen a movie with the US as the bad guy. 1 day ago:
😏
- Comment on If the Bond franchise hadn't been sold to Amazon, it was possible we could have seen a movie with the US as the bad guy. 2 days ago:
Most Bond villains are just eccentric billionaires using Sci-Fi technologies to become trillionaires through commodity speculation.
That’s what Jaime Diamon and Warren Buffett have been doing for the last fifty years.
If you can’t read that as “US are bad guys” that’s on you, brother
- Comment on We own the hardware, but not the experience anymore — Big Tech keeps building smarter, more connected devices, but the user experience feels more intrusive, more confusing, and less human 2 days ago:
Big Tech keeps building smarter devices
Smarter or just louder?
- Comment on China Is Banning Tesla-Style Retractable Door Handles Over Safety Concerns 3 days ago:
It’d be nice to see the lending market smarten up and tell him to pound sand.
Because the stock valuation has inflated so far beyond the company’s actual revenues, its been pushed into a number of major index funds and become a “must by” for 401ks and other retail investment accounts. This creates a kind-of self-fulfilling overvaluation as a result. I don’t think there’s any real market mechanism that will devalue Tesla in the near future. Kicking the Tesla tentpole means shaking up the entire S&P 500. Even the mega-hedge funds with the ability to do it don’t have a strong monetary incentive to try.
I worry he’s going to fuck out space industry in the process of fleecing NASA though.
NASA’s been a contractor’s boondoggle since at least Reagan. The Challenger Disaster can be linked directly back to an outsourcing scandal that was covered up and buried under Reagan in order to keep Thiokol Chemical Corporation (now a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman) financially insulated.
I would argue that SpaceX exists precisely because NASA has become a budget of money to be siphoned from. The Space Industry was fucked in the 80s and never really recovered, leading to our reliance on Soyuz rockets for much of the Bush Era and creating an environment at Boeing so toxic that we’ve largely lost our ability to do space flight domestically.
For all the talk of Moon bases and Mars missions, it seems the real money in aerospace is just spewing up endless waves of cheap disposable satellites for commercial communications. That’s going to be the limit of US space technology for the foreseeable future.
- Comment on China Is Banning Tesla-Style Retractable Door Handles Over Safety Concerns 3 days ago:
He’s gonna cheat to get his trillion
He’s going to try. Even then, the bar is higher than just nibbling at the margins. And everything is stacked on the shoulders of an overall positive outlook for the US economy in total. He can’t insource all his car sales in any practical sense. And he can’t use options markets to outrun the perpetual gaggle of Tesla bears nipping at his heels. He also can’t reliably expect Congress to bail him out when he’s made this many enemies inside both the White House and Congress.
That’s not to say he won’t get a piece of paper with “$1T” written on it from his company at some point. But nothing in the Tesla financials suggests he will have anywhere to cash it.
- Comment on China Is Banning Tesla-Style Retractable Door Handles Over Safety Concerns 3 days ago:
He placed loyal people on the board and had them vote to give him control of the company.
He could place loyalists on the board because he bought a controlling interest in the company.
And now he has been having them vote to give him absurd unseen before “salaries”
The latest compensation package has virtually unattainable sales targets. And the compensation is almost entirely in equity that assumes a monumental increase in stock valuation.
If he can manage it, I’d be tempted to say he earned it, except I know he’ll only “hit” the target by lying and market manipulation that will collapse as soon as he hits his mark.
- Comment on China Is Banning Tesla-Style Retractable Door Handles Over Safety Concerns 4 days ago:
I mean, “stealing” is a strong word. Elon bought them out, and they’re both enjoying a net worth in the hundreds of million.
What’s more disturbing about Elon’s tenure as head of the company is how social media manipulation, insider trading, and blatant SEC violations can pump a company’s valuation into the stratosphere.
Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard both continued to contribute advances in engineering that far exceeded the Tesla project. But they’ll never have the kind of easy credit Elon secured through politics and media manipulation.
- Comment on China Is Banning Tesla-Style Retractable Door Handles Over Safety Concerns 4 days ago:
Americans are going to mandate retractable handles in response
- Comment on Why Are Cars Getting Rid Of Android Auto? 4 days ago:
The big question is why we started adding computer operating systems to our vehicles to begin with.
Originally, automakers tried to shoehorn proprietary subscription services into their vehicles for GPS and roadside assistance and satellite radio. But the opt-in for these services was scant, because they were obnoxious to set up and overpriced relative to - say - a TomTom or a cell phone’s core features. And you could get after-market integration added to your vehicle through its entertainment system, so why bother with the clunky manufacturer options.
CarPlay and AndroidAuto were concessions that automakers began to adopt because they sold more vehicles that way. Reversing this out will likely have the same effect it did the first time - by driving people to foreign car companies like Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and Kia.
I already see Kia cars on the road fucking everywhere. And moves like this will only accelerate the trend, I’m sure.
- Comment on Why Are Cars Getting Rid Of Android Auto? 4 days ago:
So, by utilizing built-in systems, the car manufacturers would indeed be able to collect more data about how you use the systems in place, while also possibly getting more money out of you through subscriptions.
- Comment on Being afraid of vaccines is literally childish behavior. 4 days ago:
There were massive protests and constant public pushback against vaccines for as long as vaccines have existed.
There were a handful of outspoken reactionary groups in the early 19th century who registered outsized alarm. But when you look at the data, the rapid decline in smallpox over the century was the direct result of the success of inoculation domestically. By 1898, the mandatory imposition of vaccinations was functionally unnecessary, due to the near complete eradication of the disease on the island. People were - by and large - more than happy to undergo inoculation at a level that provided herd immunity.
The fight for widespread adoption of vaccination has been rough fought against the tides of the confidently ignorant who let their irrational emotions control them.
Confident ignorance has been as much a benefit to vaccine campaigns as an opposition to it. People are, by and large, trusting and appreciative of advancements in medical science, especially when they are subject to regular and repeated trauma from a chronic malady.
Quackery succeeds on this sense of naive desperation. Vaccination does, too (with the added benefit that it actually works). A straightforward solution to an immediate problem is an easy sell.
The real detriment to vaccination policy is its own success. Once you’ve systematically eliminated a disease, the social memory of the disease’s consequences fades through generations. People aren’t afraid of Polio because they don’t have a President in a wheelchair who fell victim to it. People aren’t afraid of measles because they’ve never experienced it, or had to care for children suffering from the disease.
The rapid adoption of prophylactics in the sex work community comes from people who are regularly faced with the threat of STIs, both personally and in their peer groups. People with little direct or indirect exposure to recreational sex are a much harder sell. And so we see STIs flood through religiously insular communities (ex. the sudden surge in Syphilis in Salt Lake City) that had historically shown very low rates of incidence.
This tends to set off a rebalancing of behaviors, as the community rapidly adopts the techniques for prevention. When news of an outbreak spreads, vaccine hesitancy collapses in its wake
- Comment on Harry Potter and Harry Dresden are the same guy 5 days ago:
In fairness, Expelliarmus has a higher success rate
- Comment on Being afraid of vaccines is literally childish behavior. 5 days ago:
America doesn’t just do this domestically.
They do. It’s just tied up in the private sector. Tons of quackery on American TV and in news journals. Everything from “Head On, Apply Directly to The Forehead” to Dr Oz shilling ginseng as a panacea to the social media conspiracies about MedBeds that Trump himself retweeted.
The CIA undermined polio vaccination programs in Pakistan when global eradication actually seemed possible.
Can’t let the wrong kind of people benefit
- Comment on Nearly all of Spotify has been scraped and is available via torrents 5 days ago:
deleting my account
- Comment on Nearly all of Spotify has been scraped and is available via torrents 5 days ago:
When the 25lb bag is mostly weavels?
- Comment on Nearly all of Spotify has been scraped and is available via torrents 5 days ago:
90% of Spotify is trash. Much like Audible, it’s just choking on AI generated content and similar worthless vanity projects
