Yeah, I think the joke isn’t working sorry.

Running a ship aground is something the crew does to their own ship. It does not involve other ships, only their own ship + the ground of a landmass.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_grounding

This makes a lot of sense. I do indeed stick to all on lemmy and the ignorant downvoting that often happens, reminds me of what would happen in default reddit subs like worldnews. My opt in reddit subs indeed had a way better crowd. The frontpage of Lemmy didn’t used to be this way when I first joined though.

That was all before Musk. Since musk took over, twitter gives in to all demands for censorship by governments. It went from about 50% to basically 100%. I expect that the information of users isn’t safe either.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-fulfilling-more-government-censorship-requests-under-musk

I’m sorry if I come across as preachy in the below post, but I wanted to try and explain to you where the critique is coming from. And also that it’s not personal or any widespread resentment.

I (and many others) get what a thankless and also necessary job moderating is. It’s not easy to do it well, it’s frustrating, it’s thankless and without it the community would be dead. But being a moderator and sticking out your neck brings you exposure and you are guaranteed to meet more asshats than you ever thought existed. But the users are not one homogenous group, it’s not because one user has flung abuse at moderators, that all users are now suddenly resentful of moderators.

The person you are replying to, put a good bit of time in listing what comments were most up voted, which are probably the comments that found most support amongst the users in that thread. In the same way that we should not be dismissive of what you do or say, you shouldn’t be dismissive of what others do or say (or up vote). Mutual respect and all that.

Self reflection is also important, it’s important to realize and accept that it is possible to be wrong about something. Doing a mea culpa and moving on is far easier in the long term than doubling down and digging a deeper hole, yet it’s a lot rarer because it hurts our ego in the short term.

Their final point about a problem with handling feedback rings true to me:

• You (not you personally, but the team that did that feedback thread) have apparently treated up- and down votes on a thread as a poll and a popular mandate for action, but up- and down votes are not a poll and most (probably most) people don’t use them as such.

• Up- and down votes on comments are useful for finding which remarks resonated with or turned away other users. They are not a poll either, and most upvoted are not automatically most correct at all, but they give you a chance to read the room.

• You (now you personally) have thrown shade on the people that up voted comments against the bot, by insinuating that those people might have been bots themselves and that therefore their opinions are irrelevant. Yes it’s possible that there are some users using alts, but all those users? Not very likely.

• The best feedback I saw in that thread was not in the up or down votes, it was in the comments themselves. There were some very compelling arguments as to why using a biased site to display bias, was a bad idea. Those comments also had quite a bit of upvotes, so the way I read the room, that was a popular sentiment.

• The person you are replying to made a few arguments and one scathing critique which they probably hoped that you would improve on in the future. Imo a polite disagreement with your previous statements. You respond by being dismissive of his arguments and acting like it’s a personal attack. They were sticking to facts, you’re making it about you as a person. I really don’t think that was their intent.

Nope, that’s not how it works.

There are instances that only allow up votes. There are people that will up vote any post by a dev as a show of appreciation for the effort, without necessarily thinking about or agreeing with the changes.

If you want a poll, then you have to do a proper poll. Up- and down votes are not it.

What happens when the bias checker is biased?

The mbfc site should not be used for anything. It’s just the subjective opinions of the site owner (who is misleadingly talking about “we” and “our” in his methodology page), aided by a few unknown volunteers who do some of the “checking”. The site claims to be objective, but there’s been enough examples to show that it isn’t (fe, it says that Fox News is as trustworthy as The Guardian or that CNN is somehow center left).

The so called methodology that is used, is just a lot of words that boil down to “several facets were checked by a human and that human gave a subjective rating to each facet, we then count up those subjective ratings and claim to be objective because we use a point system”.

For checking the trustworthiness of a source, I’d say that the mbfc site is about as useful as using CPU Userbenchmark for chosing a CPU. Yes, it’s easy to read and more convenient to use than other sources, but it’s also a load of horseshit and unless you drill down into the underlying “data”, you’re just going to draw the wrong conclusions because of how misleading the site is.

Some cruise missiles are able to do all those, like the tomahawk missile fe: https://www.naval-technology.com/projects/tomahawk-long-range-cruise-missile/

To me, this drone missile looks like a smaller, much cheaper version of the traditional cruise missile. Cheap to build (relatively), easy to transport, fast to launch, hard to intercept: scary times for Russia.

In 2022 there were some stories of how people on work visas were unable to jump ship while others were fleeing en masse. And now after all the tech layoffs in the USA, I imagine that finding another company to sponsor their visa, has become a lot harder still. So that’s one group still working there: people who will be deported if they lose their job.

Fox news gets the same credibility rating of “mixed” as the guardian, which should tell you all that you need to know about the credibility of the mbfc site.

Edit for context: fox news commitment to factuality, is so bad that they knowingly air news that they themselves know to be false: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-trump/673132/ Rampant misinformation, sitting on news until they can release at a more opportune time, selective reporting, airing heavily edited footage to make their guy look less like an idiot, … These are all things that fox news does, but I’m hard pressed to find any examples of the guardian doing any of these. And yet still somehow, the mbfc site wants us to believe that the guardian is as untrustworthy as fox news. Somehow I’m not buying it.

Completely. Calling NBC news center left is a real head scratcher, that bot is apparently living in an alternative facts reality.

Probably, I agree with your reasoning. I was just dumbfounded by the massacre and my first thought was that they had been collecting corpses in the trucks, but after a few trucks like that, that made no sense anymore. Then you provided the probable answer in the comments.

I only saw all the corpses inside those seemingly intact vehicles, didn’t even notice the tires.

I want to add: The guy dressed like active russian soldiers and he never had outward signs identifying him as press. The vehicles he drove in on the frontline were those of the russian army, so again no markings of being press. Thus Ukraine attacked some Russian soldiers, one of which happened to be an embedded war journalist. Afaik, Ukraine did not actively seek out or target a journalist.

This attack by Ukraine is not the same thing as the Israeli or Russian army targeting journalists. If a journalist clearly marked themselves or their vehicle as journalists, then they were more likely to be attacked by the Israeli/Russian army than if they hadn’t. Russia has even been using guided missiles to target hotels because foreign press was staying there. And given that Russia actively targeted journalists, that might be an explanation as to why this russian propagandist did not mark himself as a journalist, but imo it’s more likely that he just liked cosplaying as one of the boys.

Has there ever been done a sociological study on how many and why so many closeted homosexuals are homophobic? I can think of 2 reasons as to why, but I would love to see some numbers.

The 2 reasons I can think of: Non homosexuals don’t think as much about homo sex as closeted homosexuals, so they are less likely to constantly be thinking about gays having sex and thus less likely to speak out against it. And closeted homosexuals are probably jealous of gays that are no longer in the closet, a case of “how dare those people openly live happy lives doing what I would like to do, but can’t because I’m a bigot with a fragile ego”. And this last point is probably why it’s so often republicans who are like this: it fits with the republican mindset of being “the party of spite”.

Not really, 2k is enough to have a result with a pretty low error %. Some example numbers: https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/how-many-people-do-i-need-to-take-my-survey/

That is for “1 population” though, I don’t know if the divided USA public opinion still counts as 1 population. I’m not a polling scientist, I just know that you don’t need a massive amount of data points to draw statistically sound conclusions. Try tossing a coin and see how fast it stabilizes towards 50/50, that one really surprised me the first time I did it.

Simplified: Energy is stored as heat in matter (the jostling of atoms and molecules) and there are many more water molecules under the bridge than there are molecules/atoms in the bridge. So both the water and the metal heat up during the day and cool down at night, but since there is much more water, the water has a much more stable temperature. In short: Larger volumes of atoms have larger heat capacities.

If the water under the bridge was stagnant and a shallow puddle, then it’s temperature would vary much more throughout the day as well, but it would still warm up less than metal or soil, since a body of water loses some of it’s heat through evaporation.

This is also why coastal climate is a thing: the huge mass of water in the ocean makes it so that coastal areas are warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer.

I’m absolutely certain that it wasn’t ads that put a firm like TomTom on a downward slope. This was actually the first time that I’ve heard someone proclaim that ads are the reason.

If your business is to sell maps + navigation devices for money and then the times change and now nearly everyone already owns a smartphone with built in gps + some car manufacturers provide sat nav as a default + another company is giving access to a map away for free, well then your business is in trouble.

I’ve never even heard of ads in TomTom or Garmin, since I stopped using a dedicated sat nav once I had a smartphone, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was one of the things they tried to stay afloat after smartphones became ubiquitous.

Thanks for the name. I skimmed through it and tbh, I’m not seeing why no additional context/doubt could be provided. They might have internal guidelines to not do so, but the charter itself does not seem to stop journalists from providing additional context outside of official statements/reports. It seems to me that this sentence was a choice by the editor/journalist.

I just searched for some keywords, “fact” landed me on the paragraph that seemed most applicable: “duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming”. The other paragraphs I found, that could have been applicable, were about being impartial when UK politics were involved.

They weren’t dodging, it’s a thing and it should be the first result if you bothered to look it up: https://www.bbc.com/aboutthebbc/governance/charter