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Check yourself: The Media Bias Chart

Check yourself: The Media Bias Chart

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Just like eating different kinds of foods, you should know what you’re eating so you know if your diet is balanced, healthy, or downright garbage. Media, and social media (which has the added benefit of being largely unhealthy to boot), is the same way.

I’ve written about this before, but the Media Bias Chart continues to improve. Go check out your favorite sources, or better yet, find better ones to start reading. It’s interesting how things have shifted, and continue to shift over time – so be sure to check up on your news sources every year or so.

This is not just a chart, but something that gives us some data to infer from and can be used as a tool. I find it interesting that the more left OR right the source, that the media source pretty universally drops in quality to near garbage. This reveals a lot about how left/right partisan takes on any issue results in very poor analysis or thought about a topic.

I also find this a useful tool for those that claim to be unbiased, open minded, or whatever. Where do you think YOUR opinions fall on this chart? Now, go read something on the chart that aligns with it and see how good of a news source it really is (how far down on the y axis is your opinion)? Now, go read something that is on the OTHER side of the line. Nothing far from center. Check in the ‘skews left’ or ‘skews right’ area and read it. If you find yourself calling a largely good news source with a moderate leaning a bunch of pinko Commies or a bool-licking Nazis, then I think you might have a very distorted view of the world. It might be worthwhile to check yourself.

It’s also a good time to go watch some news broadcasts from the 1950’s-1980’s to see how journalism was done years ago. I remember being taught that a good reporter answered the 5 W’s (Who, What, Where, hoW, and Why) by just reporting the facts. It’s impossible to be unbiased; but that was at least the goal. I’m not sure if that’s even the basic premise of journalism these days.

Today I find that any news item I was actually involved in (local news to more broad industry reporting on something I knew internally to the company/etc) breaks into 2 parts. The factual part is usually pretty accurate (the person hid on the roof of this garage from police, or this guy stole a $2000 bike, or that some information X was leaked from an internal company mistake). The commentary by experts and average readers is pretty bad. I find the news source usually finds an ‘expert’ that aligns with however they’d like to spin the news item based on the particular bias of the news source.

Even worse, the comment and speculation sections in the bottom of the news articles are the absolute worst. It’s full of horribly simplistic/incorrect analysis, wildly incorrect data, inflammatory posturing/language, and often conspiracy-theory laden stuff. Which is probably why any of the better news sources do not allow commenting on news articles (hint hint). I now don’t usually go to news sources that have comment sections – or I skip those sections all together. I only have so much of my life; and I’m not wasting it sifting through hours of anonymous incorrect opinions or bad or inflammatory thought/language just to get one nugget of truth.

Which makes you wonder the value of social media like reddit in which the content IS anonymous internet opinion…

More true today than ever before

More true today than ever before

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Birdie Jay: Like Miles said, I’m a truth-teller. Some people can’t handle it.

Benoit Blanc: It’s a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth.

It’s not the first time this has been noticed.

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”

Charles Bukowski

And definitely something Oregon has seen played out in countless activist and activism groups that have proposed, and driven through, dramatic, major policy change – which has turned out to be as disastrous as many experts predicted.

Darmok and Jalad… at Tanagra

Darmok and Jalad… at Tanagra

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Darmok is a pretty famous Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. In the episode, Picard is captured then trapped on a planet with an alien captain who speaks a metaphorical language. They must learn to communicate with each other before a deadly beast overwhelms them.

This isn’t quite as strange as you might think. There are records from civilizations that didn’t have a formal written language. Darius the Great (500 BC) was once given a strange box with several objects by the Scythian army encamped against him. They had no formal writing language; so they had to interpret the message.

PAX West parties

PAX West parties

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PAX West is not just a fun gamer conference, there are also a lot of parties as well. You can find the more public ones on the PAX west parties website and Facebook group.

Finding the not-so-public ones requires being in the know and having some insider friends. 🙂

BART: An Unauthorized documentary

BART: An Unauthorized documentary

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Tunnel Vision: An Unauthorized BART Ride is a documentary film by local timelapse photographer Vincent Woo. He secretly attached a camera to a BART train and rode through the arteries of the Bay Area while inserting interesting facts and tidbits.

It became something of a local hit – selling out several movie theaters. The good news is you don’t need to go to a theater, he put it up on YouTube for free.

Viewfinder puzzle game

Viewfinder puzzle game

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Viewfinder is a new 3D puzzle game on PC and game consoles. It involves taking a picture with a film camera, then using the 2D picture to overlay the 3D world. The 2D picture then replaces/augments the 3D world with the 3D that was in the picture. It’s hard to describe, but very interested technique.

There’s also folks like Willlogs who are making their own versions in Unreal and describing how they think the mechanics work.

No-tipping movement hasn’t gone so well

No-tipping movement hasn’t gone so well

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Give workers a living wage! Tipping in restaraunts is wage slavery!

I’ve heard it all out here in Oregon. Calls to unionize restaurants have…been mixed at best. But it turns out, changing restaurant serving work to a ‘living wage’ has largely gone poorly. It turns out the people most upset and leaving restaraunts with no tipping and living wage pay are the workers themselves. A great majority of the restaurants that tried it over the last few years have quietly quit the experiment. Eater magazine, one of the most pro-food restaurant and food worker magazines has written up an excellent article ‘Why the no-tipping restaurant model failed‘. Why would workers leave living wages jobs?

It wasn’t that they didn’t try it or fully embrace the idea. High profile restaurants in San Francisco converted to a no-tipping living wage model – Sons & Daughters, Menlo Park’s Flea Street, Cotogna, Faun, and most famously, Zuni. So did restaurants in New York and other major food destinations. I often ran across restaurants in Portland that gave up tipping in favor of a mandatory living wage surcharge. Since then almost all of them have quietly quit and gone back to tipping – save a few holdouts. Why? The workers left.

It wasn’t just the diners that doomed the movement; workers saw lower earnings were also reluctant to embrace the change. At Faun, for example, Stockwell started servers at $25 per hour when the restaurant was tip-free. Even then, he says, it was “virtually impossible” to compete with what servers could make at a “similarly ambitious local restaurant with tips.” If a tipped server could make $40 to $50 an hour, or up to $350 over the course of a seven-hour shift, why do the same work for half the money?

But it wasn’t just workers. Higher costs do have an impact. A UC Irvine study found that for every dollar increase in food cost, it resulted in more than a 6% decrease in full-service restaurant employment. 

It’s not like this wasn’t expected. But politicians and activists ignored the simple economics. The wide-spread reality and economics of tipping is right there for politicians. They could have easily found out by checking W-2 reports, well, assuming workers were reporting all their tips ;). The people who were hurt from these experiments in social restructuring and activism are ironically the workers at these restaurants. They were ultimately those that had to change or lost jobs as the predicted lower actual pay and the extra costs drove away customers played out in the economy.

This is not to say that the tipping model is perfect. It certainly is not. But good intentions are NOT enough and certainly not enough to make industry-changing policy. Unintended consequences have very recently been showing the flaws of many poorly designed and implemented overly naïve activist policies.

Other first world countries like Europe and Japan manage to have very affordable food and restaurant experiences in the most expensive cities in the world without trading livability of employees. I have been surprised to find my meals in Paris, London, and Tokyo were often better, and cheaper, than many I have had in the US. Perhaps we should learn more about how their working systems operate instead of letting activist, who rarely have experience or training, legislate policy.