I'm not surprised that Taibbi is going after NewsGuard because it is one of the more systematic efforts to push back against propaganda mills that pretend to be legitimate news-gathering operations. It's inevitable that folks will disagree with at least some of their metrics, but this organization strikes me as being run by true-blue journalist types who aren't carrying anybody's political water.
A sense of things via a GAO report: "For example, DOD reported that it obligated about $12.3 million for paper clips in fiscal year 2015, which represents about 0.0002 percent of the total O&M base obligations for that fiscal year."
How to estimate, to do quick back-of-the-envelope calculations:
2 trillion: 2,000,000,000. 1 million: 1,000,000. Cancel out zeroes. (aka divide) Leaves you with 2,000 and 1. What percent of 2000 is 1? Move the decimal point three places over. Two places takes you to 1%. A third, to .1%. A percent is a fraction of 100: "per centum", Latin, literally "for one hundred". The % sign is a stylized fraction thing btw, with the horizontal bar. In other words division (fractions are just dividing). 0 over 100. Evolved in early modern scribal writing.
So back to our problem. We moved the decimal over 3 places. That leaves us with 2. 1 divided by 2—smaller over larger: one-half or .5. Slap on our three decimal places we have "saved up" from our moving the decimal point over: .0005. That's .05% and there's our estimate.
Check own work with a calculator, never hurts to double-check yourself. Yep, correct.
This would be 5 "permyriad", or 5 "basis points", same thing, a ten thousandth, equivalently, a hundredth of one percentage point. And now you know what those are in finance (interest rates, bond yields) if you didn't know before. Mortgage "points"? Yep they're related.
I'm not surprised that Taibbi is going after NewsGuard because it is one of the more systematic efforts to push back against propaganda mills that pretend to be legitimate news-gathering operations. It's inevitable that folks will disagree with at least some of their metrics, but this organization strikes me as being run by true-blue journalist types who aren't carrying anybody's political water.
That’s also my opinion.
A sense of things via a GAO report: "For example, DOD reported that it obligated about $12.3 million for paper clips in fiscal year 2015, which represents about 0.0002 percent of the total O&M base obligations for that fiscal year."
So my $50 bet is a very safe one!! The DoD spent less than a twelfth of the friggin’ paperclip budget on Newsguard.
How to estimate, to do quick back-of-the-envelope calculations:
2 trillion: 2,000,000,000. 1 million: 1,000,000. Cancel out zeroes. (aka divide) Leaves you with 2,000 and 1. What percent of 2000 is 1? Move the decimal point three places over. Two places takes you to 1%. A third, to .1%. A percent is a fraction of 100: "per centum", Latin, literally "for one hundred". The % sign is a stylized fraction thing btw, with the horizontal bar. In other words division (fractions are just dividing). 0 over 100. Evolved in early modern scribal writing.
So back to our problem. We moved the decimal over 3 places. That leaves us with 2. 1 divided by 2—smaller over larger: one-half or .5. Slap on our three decimal places we have "saved up" from our moving the decimal point over: .0005. That's .05% and there's our estimate.
Check own work with a calculator, never hurts to double-check yourself. Yep, correct.
This would be 5 "permyriad", or 5 "basis points", same thing, a ten thousandth, equivalently, a hundredth of one percentage point. And now you know what those are in finance (interest rates, bond yields) if you didn't know before. Mortgage "points"? Yep they're related.