Obviously dependent on the number of comments, let’s call that n. Maybe as often as n^-0.6 in unemotional topics, and closer to n^-1.5 for politics and current events. Comment score is a better predictor of comment age than comment quality.

At 9 comments in 2 hours, it’s already false in this thread.

It’s usually not classified this way, but I consider 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall a New Year’s song. It combines two of the main NYE traditions – alcohol and counting backwards.

Hi there, our algorithm thinks you might be suicidal. So we sent some cops to your house to shoot your dog and see if you’re okay. We aren’t trying to save your life and don’t expect our response to improve your situation in any way. We’re doing everything we can to avoid legal culpability and ensure that your recent or eventual death is officially classified as “not our fault”.

I was a volunteer admin on the site ~15 years ago. I think I still have privileges there, but haven’t been actively editing or adminning recently due to a long series of policy changes that removed almost all of the site’s appeal to users such as myself. The site split from ehow due to a founders’ dispute over the value of crowdsourcing and wiki-spirited openness. Now that wikihow is doing everything that Jack Herrick hated about ehow, I think it’s time to call his experiment a failure.

Most of the content is now being created by staff writers, often for advertising sponsors. Often not even a how-to topic. Many of these articles are fully protected. It’s very much the sort of crap I used to delete, when I was deleting crap for them. Most non-staff articles are hidden and unsearchable.

There is no quality control. Staff have openly embraced SEO and clickbait engagement metrics, at the expense of factual accuracy. This has resulted in the mass emigration of editors like me who used to provide fact-checking services. The “expert review” is a joke. It’s only there because Google thinks it makes the site credible. Google is wrong and are defrauding their searchers too.

There is no editing community anymore. Some children like the gamification aspects and use user spaces as a social media and chat site. It’s not well-suited for that purpose, but they’re children and don’t know any better. I think one editor from my era is still active. I don’t know why he’s still there.

They’re arguably violating the copyright of their editors by hiding the history tabs and denying CC-BY attribution. They did CYA by only using the CC licensing for external reuse, while granting wikihow broad rights to use submitted content commercially and without attribution. This policy was not as well advertised as the Creative Commons part, and no doubt some of the content creators from my era either didn’t notice, or expected wikihow to not abuse it. Hiding this also adversely affects readers’ ability to access an article’s reliability by checking for better versions and impedes the transition from reader to editor.

I clicked expecting chloroform.

Thank you for your service.

Clay Higgins (R-LA), but I hadn’t heard of him before today so can’t say much about him.

So this is the bill that until last week, the majority didn’t even want to vote on, until the new AZ rep won her special election and makes them? Then it turns out they (almost) all agreed with her anyway? Amazing how things work in Congress.

I’d require something after algebra 2, but not necessarily calculus. Calc 1 should be an option, just not the only one. Other options could include Stats / Data Analysis, or a Discrete math with CS algorithmic applications.

When I include statistics here, I don’t mean the more common (and IMO useless) pre-calculus stats class where you get to calculate the standard deviation of 5 numbers and draw box plots. I’d rather a class inspired by How to Lie with Statistics. Techniques for collecting biased data, or selectively interpreting good data to reach a pre-determined conclusion. Immediate career implications for prospective journalists, politicians, marketers, etc. and also societally useful in a Defense Against the Dark Arts sort of way.

I’m not dexterous enough to do the 1024 thing. Usually I just point my index finger at the appropriate point on a meter stick. With cm precision, that’s 100 and if I do the same with my other hand, I can count 10000

Marketing a 512 GB device is maliciously and intentionally deceptive. If it were 500GB, the consumer has fair warning that the size is not a power of 2 and might suspect that the GBs aren’t binary either. There is no reason to make it 512GB except to imply the consumer is getting their full 2^39 bytes.

Can I just point out that the middleman taking a commission adds no value to this transaction. I can give a neighbor a can of beans directly and anonymously through my neighborhood little free pantry.

Do you mean overall, as a societal ill? or on a per mile basis?

If the answers are different, it’s only because even drunks know better than to go street racing.

The law applies to licensed mental health clinicians

Wait, these quacks are licensed? I just assumed they were like homeopaths, chiropractors, crystal healers, etc. operating outside the consumer protection of ‘medicine’.

I walk regularly in my neighborhood. There are pedestrian friendly streets nearby, but most of them aren’t. Many roads have no sidewalks and narrow shoulders – you can either jump in the ditch or slap the side mirrors of passing cars. Even where there are sidewalks, the city for some reason built them with zero separation from the traffic. The busier intersections are dangerous to pedestrians, even if crossing with the signal. It’s generally assumed that everyone drives everywhere. Walkers are presumed to be sub-human homeless bums, and bicyclists are presumed to be the even more despicable enviro-commies. For some reason, there’s a lot of fatties around here too. Overall, not a very good grade, and we should try to be better.

We all know what the ‘m’ stands for. If m*nkeypox has unmarketable connotations, then m-pox isn’t any improvement.

It’s like when K*ntucky Fried Chicken rebranded as KFC, an initialism that officially stands for nothing. We still all know where it’s from, and are either OK with that or we aren’t.

Pronounce and pronunciation seem like they should have the same root, but one of them has an extra ‘o’ for some perfectly logical reason. I know the difference and don’t consistently misspell it, but if I edit a sentence to switch from one to the other without noticing that it’s a danger inflection …

Also maintain vs. maintenance for the same reason.

“Please don’t be offended if I get an erection during this scene.”

“Also, please don’t be offended if I don’t.”

The day I learned this was the last day I made fun of poor people doing various stereotypical things that are considered “bad financial habits” in middle class upbringings. For example, buying lottery tickets with your welfare money is NOT evidence of poor people being bad at math. It’s a rational financial decision in their existing regulatory environment. A lottery winner can fly right over the welfare cliff, while the people saving up for a car repair get punished and pulled back into poverty. Maybe they’ll enjoy a few years of luxury until they squander it all because they never learned that staying off the dole requires different strategies than getting off the dole.

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