Just a dude on the internet

Guy's been annoyed with bugs on his Android phone.
Guy notices phone is burning through battery with no clear explanation why.
Guy writes about it on his personal blog.
Story gets picked up by bgr.com.
Story shows up on the front page of yahoo.com.
Brilliant commenters like Daren say:
What an extremely smart guy Jason Kallelis must be. I mean look at his resume, even working for "Writing About Tech". You would think that somebody this smart would realize that it may actually be a hardware issue rather than a software issue? Like battery drain has NEVER happened on iOS or an iPhone?

... and so on it goes.

And all this time, Jason is just a random dude on the internet with an opinion. He's not claiming to be an expert. He's not claiming he hasn't missed something. He's just frustrated and enjoys sharing on the internet.

The meta story here is:
1. Just how unvetted this content made it to the front page of yahoo. For all we know the content is completely made up
2. Just how little commenters like Daren look at what they're reading before they pick any excuse to poke and make fun
3. Just how powerful media outlets can be by legitimizing a random person's opinion, and therefore how irresponsible they are for providing no context about what they are sharing

We really need good journalism to come back, and for people to recognize the clear distinction between credible, researched stories versus a stream of opinions by random people in the world.

We also need people to somehow hold their emotions in check when a random person chooses a different phone for a different reason.

The American People

Today's copy of TMQ tangent-rants about politicians using phrases like "frankly", "quite frankly" and "the American people" to superfluously emphasize their points. I'd like to pile on.

Easterbrook points out the obvious issue: no politician could possibly know that every American person agrees with their point. I'd like to go one more:

There is nothing that 300+ million people can agree on. Nothing. Consider that in our country there are pacifists and gun nuts, religious and atheist, pro-life, suicidal, racist, insane, ... literally anything you offer would be rejected by someone. Even food or air or shelter. This reveals a critical truth: any legislation we approach will NOT work for some people and we just need to accept this as fact. Thus, the question needs to shift to the much more appropriate question: what legislation does the most good for the most people?

Learning to phrase it this way would help us cut through the inevitable noise of those who are negatively affected and allow us to keep the perspective that the goal is to do net good. Granted there are many ways to define "good" and assess the benefit of a particular change, but at least we can start talking like adults instead of 9-year-olds.