Miter Saw Stands, a Dummies Review

Miter Saw Stand

Few, if any, freelancers provide a greater disservice to their readers than those who generate fake product reviews. The worst of the worst, if you ask us, are those who publish page after page of "The 5 Best..." and "The 10 Best..." compilations. How dumb do you have to be not to realize that few (if any) people have performed a head-to-head-to-head-to-head-to-head comparison of all five (then turned around and did it again the next year?) You know the greed-sucking freelancer just compiled all that information from Amazon reviews... not unlike "Power Tool Expert" (Dustin Fredrickson) and his "Best Miter Saw Stand 2017."¹

Bike-Friendly Towns for the Dummy Cyclist

North Cedar Lake Trail

One of the "tricks" that cash-hungry freelancers have adopted at the content farms that let them create their own titles¹ is to reword a magazine article or even someone else's online content. This is especially popular with those who know nothing about the topic but are desperate for a post to meet "deadline." We suspect that's the case of "Get Active: 5 of the Best Cities in the US for Cycling," posted to the blogsite IntentBlog.com by returning DotD Natalie Bracco.

Mean and Median for Statistical Dummies

Measures of central tendency

Here at the Antisocial Network, we're in the habit of calling out people for exposing their lack of experience, knowledge or common sense in hopes of making money; often while answering (or pretending to answer) questions or providing how-to "instructions." Every once in a while, however, we run across a bit of dumbassery that wasn't published  at a content farm. Today is one of those times: our DotD awardee is Keryn Newman, a NIMBY blogger trying to stop a power line in West Virginia. No matter how honorable – or self-serving, we didn't read through the entire blog – Keryn's cause may have been, it's pretty clear that she never took a class in statistics (she must've been one of those damned journalism majors...). All you need do to figure out that deficiency is to take the time to read her post "Median vs. Midpoint" carefully.

The Young Earth for Creationist Dummies

Today we take a look at the phenomenon of selective blindness, the practice of ignoring anything that does not fit with your preconceived notions. Our DotD today uses the yahoo email address job41 to conceal his name, but, at least according to the scanned letter in the body of his blog post "The Bible and Radiometric dating,"¹ his name might be Scott Taylor. Of course, given the tendency of creationists to endlessly recycle the same bogus information, who knows whether that's his real name: it might even be a pseudonym used to protect him from the well-deserved ridicule of others less blind to facts.

But let's take a look at a few examples of job41's bull, beginning with this claim:

Horizontal Drilling and Fracking for Activist Dummies

Monterey Shale outcrop

There's only one greater source of misinformation on the internet than the freelancers who grub for money at content farms, and that's blogs. Bloggers, bless their pointy little heads, have even fewer checks on truth and accuracy than content farmers. Take for instance a Californian by the name of Jim Taylor, who's vehemently opposed to "fracking" in that state. In a post he called "What Do You Want In Your Water?"¹ Jim went off track when he conflated fracking with horizontal drilling, and he missed the mark by a mile as he "explained" the reasons for going sideways: