exasperation

Partially. I think it's a good drop in replacement for:

• Anything technology oriented, from software to hardware to what different open source projects are up to, to what tech corporations are doing, and various discussions around ecosystems (the internet itself, specific services like Discord or Reddit or LinkedIn, app stores, social networking, etc.)
• Funny memes or other humor

It's got pretty good coverage of certain topics:

• Politics, at least on specific sub topics
• Science and specific scientific disciplines

It has a few pockets that work for very specific things:

• Specific TV show or movie franchises (looking at you, Star Trek)
• ADHD or neurodivergent support/advice
• Noncredible Defense is actually here. Love it.

And it's just missing a bunch of things I loved on Reddit:

• Sports, especially the unique culture of the NBA subreddit
• Other specific interests in television, film, music, or other cultural interests.
• Local things in specific cities
• Finance and economics stuff
• Lots of specific interests/hobbies are missing, or just aren't as active.
• Advice/support for career/work life, especially specific careers (in my case, the legal industry and life as a lawyer)
• Advice/support relating to personal relationships, from parenting to dating to very specific support forums for things like divorce or cancer. Even what does exist here is disproportionately neurodivergent, so the topics of focus seem to be pretty different than what would be discussed in other places.

The law falls back to a bunch of hidden rules if the language isn't explicit.

"No vehicles in the park" is a simple rule, but then poses problems when you have to ask whether that includes baby strollers, regular bicycles, or electric assist bicycles, whether there's an exception for ambulances in an emergency, etc.

Somewhat famously, there was a case a decade or so ago where someone was prosecuted under Sarbanes Oxley's obstruction of justice provisions, passed to criminalize Enron-like accounting coverups. The guy was convicted for tossing undersized fish overboard to avoid prosecution for violating fish and wildlife rules. The statute made it a crime for anyone who “knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence” a federal investigation. So the Supreme Court had to figure out whether a fish is a "tangible object" in the meaning of the law, when it is clearly a "tangible object" within the normal meaning of the term, but not the type of object that stores records, as everything else described in the criminal statute.

So that just means, in the end, simplicity of language can betray complexity of meaning underneath. Lawyers tend to prefer to make things clear up front so that there's no uncertainty later on, and that just leads to unreasonably complicated language.

But imagine describing an area in meter•feet instead of square feet or square meters. That could really piss everyone off.

You don't need an extra document to define each term as it is expected that others in the field will understand the language used.

For lawyers, it's the opposite, actually. Lawyers are overly cautious and choose to explicitly define terms themselves, all the time. If they can reference a definition already in a specific law, great. But they'll go ahead and explicitly make that link, instead of relying on the reader to assume they know which law to look up.

So any serious contract tends to use pages and pages of definitions at the beginning.

Imagine programmers being reluctant to use other people's libraries, but using the same function and variable names with slightly different actual meanings/purposes depending on the program. That's what legal drafting is like.

I wonder about the discrepancy in the line for Met in Bar or Restaurant though, the 2010 upward trend in that is totally absent in the OP image.

The caption for OP's image says that stat was "cleaned up" to adjust for people meeting online. That could mean that some survey respondents met online and decided to meet in person in a bar or restaurant, and answered yes to both questions, and that those couples should be counted as "online" only.

Or it could mean they were actively swiping while at a bar or restaurant and looked up to see matches they've been recommended.

In earlier generations more people didn't even go to college. If you're in the 70% of silent generation that never went to college, you're certainly not going to meet a spouse there. Especially if you attended a university that was only for one gender.

When I was dating in the late 2000's and early 2010's, I remember adding dates as friends on Facebook, somewhere around the first date, specifically to be able to get a sense of their personality/background/interests, and to show off mine, even for people I met in person.

It wasn't online dating through a dating app, but online presence was still a huge part of the actual process.

Even before that, in the early 2000's, I remember stuff like AIM profiles that could at least link to photo albums that show off things that you've done recently. And even then having always-on broadband Internet, to where we'd be logged into AIM or ICQ, was its own flex.

The number of people who are partnered vs single is 70%. If 60% of those met via dating apps, that's 42% of the total.

You're still not slicing thin enough.

If 60% of the couples who got together in 2022 met on dating apps, and people who got together in 2022 constitute 5% of all couples, that's still possible (and probable), then those couples will still only be 3% of the total. Pretty easy to add up to 11% that way when you start including all the 10-year-old relationships, the 20-year-old relationships, etc.

If it were flat at 60% for all years then no, it wouldn't add up.

But if you look at the area under the curve, it's still pretty small comparatively speaking because it's such a recent phenomenon. (And not every year would actually count equally for the whole data set, but it's displayed in this chart as every year adding up to 100% for its own year.)

About half of those under 30 (53%) report having ever used a dating site or app

Yes, but that's a bigger denominator, and includes single people, and even those who have never been on a date. The headline question is what percent of couples met through different methods, not what percent of individuals, including those who are not currently in a couple.

So it doesn't make sense that more people would have met their current partner through a dating app than have ever used one.

It could be that a higher percent of couples met online than the percent of people who have ever used online dating. If you have a data set where online dating is literally the only way to meet people, but only half of the people are trying that method, you'd have the situation where 100% of couples met online but only 50% of people have ever tried online dating (this hypothetical is purely to demonstrate the math, not claiming that this is in any way a reflection or the actual data).

It's entirely possible (and I'd argue is likely) that the 53% who have used dating services are more likely to be in couples than the 47% who haven't. And so that larger subset of the 47% would therefore be excluded in the "percent of couples" data.

mostly I'm just bothered by the apparent lack of any way to confirm the authenticity of the graph and its relationship to the source material

The 2019 paper I've linked is authored by the maintainers of the linked data set, and contains a very similar graph with an earlier cutoff (2017 data). I'm sure those authors know their data set. It's just most of their papers using this data is paywalled, and the data is mainly used for other types of analyses.

If I have time I might be able to download the data set from a computer and just map it either naively or by applying the correct weights.

but the study they are citing doesn't seem to confirm anywhere close to the 60% figure, it seems to be saying 11.5% instead

I think you've linked the variable of all couples regardless of when they got together. If 11.5% of all couples met online, whether they met in 2023 or 1975, then that doesn't actually disprove the line graph (which could be what percentage of couples who met in that particular year met through each method).

The researchers who maintain the data set you've linked published an analysis of the 2017 data showing that it was approaching 40% towards the most recent relationships being formed, in 2017. I could believe that post-covid, the trends have approached 60%.

Yeah, one night stands can turn into lasting relationships. I know a decent number of married couples who met in zero-commitment contexts, whether it's a hookup from a bar or while on vacation in a tourist town or things like that. Or even meeting on a hookup-oriented app that somehow turned into a not-just-for-hookups service after becoming acquired by Match, but during the phase when it was most definitely mainly for no-strings hookups.

Probably. But it's also a bit of a difficult question to compare the two.

One prominent estimate is that about half of all humans who have ever lived died from mosquito-related illness, about 50 billion of the 100 billion humans who have ever lived.

For humans, it's estimated that about 3-4% of paleolithic humans died from violence at the hands of another person, and that number may have risen to about 12% during medieval history, before plummetting in the modern age.

But that's the comparison of direct violence versus illness. Humans have a strong capacity to indirectly cause death, including by starvation, illness, indirect trauma. How do we count deaths from being intentionally starved as part of a siege? Or biological weapons, including the time the Nazis intentionally flooded Italian marshes to increase malaria? Do we double count those as both human and mosquito deaths?

And then there's unintentional deaths, caused by indifference or recklessness or negligence. Humans have caused famines, floods, fires, etc.

So yeah, mosquitoes probably win. But don't sleep on humans. And remember that the count is still going on, and humans can theoretically take the lead in the future.