The only President I recognize is

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.

jihadists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihad

Arabic word that means “exerting”, “striving”, or “struggling”, particularly with a praiseworthy aim

Curious choice of words.

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.

By that metric there were maybe two AAA PC games in all of 1998.

There were a lot fewer, certainly. FF7 was the heavyweight. Zelda: Ocarina, MGS, and StarCraft were in the running. Shenmu (produced a year later) had a budget north of $47M (the high fluctuation in Yen value making this a hard calculation).

But you wouldn’t see truly big budget gaming until GTA4 crested the nine digit mark.

Bordering on eight digits in 2000 was not a small game at all.

The difference between $7M and $47M is a buncha lotta money.

Lots of things don’t make sense when you’re drunk

The series was very good, but it was still a low budget project. BG1 was developed for an estimated $1.5-3M. BG2 was developed for $7M. I can’t even find budgets for Icewind Dale or Planescape: Torment.

But compare that the BG3’s $100M budget (closer to $200M after marketing).

These were great games, but they were largely indie games. None of them had AAA budgets back in the 90s. Even at the scale of the era, Ultima XI cost $12M to produce. The OG FF7 cost $45M.

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.

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.

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.

Gotta keep the Boy Who Cried Wolf around in case there’s a wolf.

I have heard the smoke alarm many, many times.

I have never been in a burning building

Misread that as

I don’t have chicken

Only thing you can do is crack a door and take a peak.

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.

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.

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.

YouTube claims their Shorts channel gets 200 billion views per day. There’s only 5 billion Internet users on Earth.

😏