this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
498 points (96.8% liked)

Confidently Incorrect

4435 readers
204 users here now

When people are way too smug about their wrong answer.

Posting guidelines.

All posts in this community have come from elsewhere, it is not original content, the poster in this community is not OP. The person who posts in this community isn’t necessarily endorsing whatever the post is talking about and they are not looking to argue with you about the content in the post.

You are welcome to discuss and debate any topic but arguments are not welcome here. I consider debate/discussions to be civil; people with different opinions participating in respectful conversations. It becomes an argument as soon as someone becomes aggressive, nasty, insulting or just plain unpleasant. Report argumentative comments, then ignore them.

There is currently no rule about how recent a post needs to be because the community is about the comeback part, not the topic.

Rules:

• Be civil and remember the human.

• No trolling, insults or name calling. Swearing in general is fine, but not to insult someone.

• No bigotry of any kind, including homophobia, transphobia, sexism and racism.

• You are welcome to discuss and debate any topic but arguments are not welcome here. I consider debate/discussions to be civil; people with different opinions participating in respectful conversations. It becomes an argument as soon as someone becomes aggressive, nasty, insulting or just plain unpleasant. Report argumentative comments, then ignore them.

• Try not to get too political. A lot of these posts will involve politics, but this isn’t the place for political arguments.

• Participate in good faith - don’t be aggressive and don’t argue for arguements sake.

• Mark NSFW posts if they contain nudity.

• Satire is allowed but please start the post title with [satire] so other users can filter it out if they’d like.

Please report comments that break site or community rules to the mods. If you break the rules you’ll receive one warning before being banned from this community.

This community follows the rules of the lemmy.world instance and the lemmy.org code of conduct. I’ve summarised them here:

  1. Be civil, remember the human.
  2. No insulting or harassing other members. That includes name calling.
  3. Respect differences of opinion. Civil discussion/debate is fine, arguing is not. Criticise ideas, not people.
  4. Keep unrequested/unstructured critique to a minimum.
  5. Remember we have all chosen to be here voluntarily. Respect the spent time and effort people have spent creating posts in order to share something they find amusing with you.
  6. Swearing in general is fine, swearing to insult another commenter isn’t.
  7. No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia or any other type of bigotry.
  8. No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 72 points 1 day ago (4 children)

In a sense, it is semantics. It's mathematically wrong but it's correct in terms of messaging. If you say that prices increased by 100%, then decreased by 50%, to a lot of people it sounds like they are still higher than the original.

It's sort of like how the 1/3 pound burger failed in America because people thought it was smaller than the equally priced 1/4 pound burger.

People are dumb is the point.

And if there is one competency Trump has, it's communicating to dumb people.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

but like he could just have said it's X times cheaper

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It might be correct in a technical sense but it's first and foremost misleading. If something costs $150 and the seller offers for the price to come down 50%, you'd rightfully expect the price to be $75, not $100. The seller could argue that it's some 50% markup being removed but would you believe that to be a genuine explanation, or that the seller is trying to mislead or scam you?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure we're saying the same thing

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Mostly yes, but I take issue with the statement that it's "correct in terms of messaging". In short, I'd say that it's technically correct but incorrect in terms of messaging as pretty much everyone would understand the wrong message.

But being misleading is very much in character for Trump.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

It's also not correct even in a technical sense. For what that's worth. It's a made up number to sound really big and impressive, even if it is not true in any sense.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Republicans have consciously targeted a fifth grade educational level for decades now. Trump's innovation was targeting a third grade level.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

It's sort of like how the 1/3 pound burger failed in America because people thought it was smaller than the equally priced 1/4 pound burger.

I've never heard of this. What? The average American doesn't know how fractions work? This country never ceases to amaze me.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Had a guy swear up and down that 2/3 is larger than 3/4. This was brought up because he was telling me he was teaching his son math. Guy was at least 45+.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

A&W tried it in the 80's and apparently more than half the people in the focus group thought the burger was smaller because 3 is less than 4. They renamed it the 3/9th burger so dumbass Americans wouldn't feel like they were being ripped off. Americans have been leading the world in dumbassery for the decades at this point.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago

if anything, 3/9 would be more confusing to me, cuz now I have to "calculate" how much that actually is, as opposed to knowing the amount by heart