Unemployed journalist, burner, raver, graphic artist and vandweller.

I read news so you don’t have to (but you still should).

  • 137 Posts
  • 186 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 2023

help-circle
  • Well, this is somewhat of a tedious slog to figure out what “young adults” are defined as.

    From the abstract:

    Sociodemographic characteristics and descriptive statistics for the analytic sample are presented in Table 1. Notably, the sample had a mean age of 29.11 years. Among participants, 79.7 % identified as cisgender women, and 31.3 % identified as gender and/or sexual minorities. The majority of participants held at least a college degree (88.1 %) and identified as very liberal or liberal (72.6 %). At Wave 5, approximately one-quarter of participants met symptom-based thresholds for at least …

    Ellipsis not mine. Good thing we get to a fourth significant figure on age, though.

    So, we have an absurdly skewed dataset … I’ll round, because this is … not data. Eight in 10 are women and nine in 10 have at least a bachelor’s. That’s going to get you results, but how they apply to the population in general is an exercise for statisticians who should know better.

    If you want to say “most college-educated women,” we have a starting point, though still no clear age range, which is a fatal flaw for the premise of the conclusion. It’s unclear what setting up a survey under these conditions was intended to measure.

















  • I tend not to think about just how long ago 2006 was, but I lived with my fiancee in a small apartment complex where we pretty much all knew each other … nine units all facing a courtyard. In the summer, I’d roll the large Weber grill out to the grass, light the coals, and anyone who wanted to throw some meat on was welcome to do so.

    This was pretty much every night; in exchange for my charcoal contribution, I’d often be offered tri-tip leftovers or a bespoke burger. We were a very diverse group, and I can’t imagine that we’d all agree politically on any given point.

    Nonetheless, we’d congregate around the grill, having brought out our camp chairs, and we’d sit there for hours, just shooting the shit, telling stories, playing cards or board games, and laughing our asses off while drinking beer. Bonding over food and drink as humans have for millennia. Smartphones weren’t a thing yet, nor was Facebook.

    It was just neighbors hanging out, a chance for social interaction without being overwhelmed. We formed a bowling team with one of the other (redneck as fuck) couples, and politics were just never discussed, because whether you like the president doesn’t affect your odds of a strike.

    The suffusion of politics into everything, along with the rise of manipulative social media, has killed these simple moments of humanity. I just want to go join a commune at this point.