Gregory's ServerOh no!
China gonna get us!
Scary scary--
hold up. what is this "right axis" and "left axis" stuff?
(see next tweet)
 26 comments
  I mean, the stats themselves are OK, but dang, that dataviz. Whoever designed it was either incompetent or malicious. Reminds me of the stuff you'd see on Fox News.  @futurebird if trends continue, they'll catch up in the year ~3000 😱 If climate change hasn't sizzled or drowned us  @futurebird I know plenty of people who simply wouldn't understand anything other than "highest line spends most". A lot of misinformation is like that. The truth is one step further out, and that's just far enough that most won't reach it.  @futurebird to make things more complicated, don't forget about Purchasing Power Parity.. Ignoring the 'omg teh reds' alarmism, the Chinese are getting a lot more bang for their buck.  @futurebird Similar game being played on climate change stats. The US and China are neck and neck for the dishonour of "world's biggest polluter", but you wouldn't know that from the graphs in Western media. @futurebird the scales are off by a factor of 2 as well. everything except the US should be squashed to 50% height @futurebird the EU is so far off and didn't even fit on the list or would have needed a "middle axis'?  @_tt_ @futurebird it is about countries, so likely only a single EU country could be listed. Don't know how much all EU countries spending together would for into that. @futurebird and even that one makes China seem larger (compared to US) than it actually is, because the lower half is stretched 2x compared to the upper half (with 50B per tick instead of 100B per tick). @futurebird Both say "Federal Reserve Board of St. Louis" - is this where they *both* came from? I ask because I want to know who floated the bullsh*t graph: the Fed, or someone *mangling* a thing the Fed provided and didn't own up to what they did? I don't love the Fed by a long shot, but that's a sort of lie I wouldn't suspect them of handling so clumsily.  @futurebird @futurebird Ignoring the flaws of the graph, this still isn't a reason to be concerned. They gave more than thrice the population of the US. Them spending a tiny more still means they spend far less per capita. But, anything to be xenophobic against China, right? (not you, but rather the creator of the graph, just to be clear) @allenstenhaus military isn’t exactly a service that gets provided on a per capita basis, so I’m not sure why you would weight it that way. Am I missing something?   @futurebird wow, even with your hint this is so misleading. I looked at both axes and thought "no these units match" and checked really carefully, until it finally hit me. That's not even misleading, it's a graphical lie, displaying an intersection (one of the things we learn to treat as significant on a graph) where there is none. I was looking for something sneaky and this was too blatant to notice 😳  |
For crying out loud!