How many Slashdot stories are untrue? Does anyone have any idea?

This is not a cautionary tale about the fundamental unreliability of wikipedia. This is a cautionary tale about the fundamental unreliability of human knowledge. That Taiwanese English professor, those "innumerable blog posts and book reports", that book on Jews and Jesus - all of them accepted the account as given. That makes them *also* unreliable, together with the plethora of tertiary sources that might cite them. The fact that the untruth was initially added to wikipedia and not some other location is irrelevant. The real problem is the tendency of mankind to accept things as given without checking up on it.

That's right, the study failed to correct for income.

Even today, per capita wages are 30% higher in the West vs in the East of Germany. It shouldn't be a mystery that people offered a prize with greater value cheated more.

What does the US have to do with Russia's alleged crimes against the Netherlands?

What does the US and England have to do with anything?

It's the Netherlands and Malaysia that are most directly harmed, and the US is merely voicing opinions on the matter. It's people from the Netherlands who are being kept from the bodies of their relatives. I don't recall the dutch shooting down any airliners.

All this focus on Iran Air is just blatant deflection.

Let me tell you my secret trick for those sites:

Use a filename.

Neat trick, to focus on 'federal income tax'.

Rich people don't earn the majority of their money as income, or salary. Poor people pay taxes in ways other than federal income tax.

You can vote for a different government. The fact that people aren't coming to bulldoze your house right now, is because people have voted for a government that does not allow it. It's not because of your personal fighting prowess.

Power is always gonna exist. All you are actually asking for is a change from one person, one vote, to one dollar, one vote.

In a truly free market, I can hire someone to throw you out of your house if you refuse to sell it.

Locationally smaller government just hands an advantage to those who can manipulate geographic legal differences, ranging from rich people easily capable of moving themselves and their assets around, to companies that can exist whereever they want instantly and perhaps simultaneously.

In comparison, poor people and smaller businesses suffer because they are unable to physically move, and so there is no actual inter-state competition for legislation that affects them. Thus, a race to the bottom is created where policy shifts to be extremely favourable to mobile populations and corporate entities, and extremely unfavourable to ordinary people.

Yeah, exactly. Ron Paul should answer this: why is it that those states that are fucking over Tesla also in general states run by the party he is a member of?

"Small government" is a slogan. Actual republican policy is to manipulate political power to favor their sponsors. Rand Paul is just a fig leaf for that.

No, I am in the position of saying that whether or not there is an illiteracy issue in the US or not, you, Karmashock, are full of shit.

Personally, I think the evidence, as far as I have seen *is* ambiguous and scant. I'm not sufficiently interested in this argument to go digging for sources to back up the opposing point of view, since I'm not sure I even hold it - at least to any great extent.

My bone in this debate (as a professional statistician) is simply to point out that the specific data source you quoted is not what you presented it as. Thus it's deeply offensive to me that you misrepresent a statistical estimate and then have the temerity to go:

Assert as you wish. But without actual evidence, your claim is a mere assertion. I don't have to prove the opposite of your assertion to show that.

Careful there.

Those values you quoted are *not* education statistics. They are estimates from a model built on national data, only a very small number of which actually came from Montana. In short, these are *specifically* driven by demographic data, and for especially low population, unusual demographic states like Montana, can potentially give very inaccurate results.

http://nces.ed.gov/naal/estima...

Specifically, the estimate for 2003 uses the following set of predictors:

- Percentage of the county population who were foreign-born and who had stayed in the United States for 20 years or less years;
- Percentage of county population age 25 and older with only a high school education or less;
- Percentage of the county population who were Black or Hispanic;
- Percentage of the county population in households with incomes below 150 percent of poverty level;
- Indicator variable identifying the New England and North Central census divisions; and
- Indicator variable identifying the SAAL states.

Seriously yes. Most of the above skills are nice and all, but the likelihood is that not any one person will have all of the above. Which means you need to work with other people. In fact if one guy has a particular skill, you need to be able to educate the rest of the group in it. It's no use building a group where if one guy dies everyone is fucked.