My brother called me today, and in our chat he brought up an email he got stating that if you spread the $700 billion bailout in stimulus checks over the adult population instead of giving it to the CEOs, we'd get, like, $400k each or something like that.
Now, I straight-up can't wrap my head around $700 billion, so that sounded pretty plausible. Also, the guy telling me this is a financial whiz kid with degrees in accounting and finance who practically grows money on trees. I figure if he was that alarmed, then so should I be as well. I started getting really pissed off.
But... this is the internet, you know, and he got this "revelation" through chain spam.
I just checked on the US Census Bureau's website. Their latest statistic (from 2006) puts the number people in the US who are 18 or older as 225,633,342. Divide $700 billion by that, and you get only $3102 for each adult.
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It's just like those emails I've been getting about Sarah Palin. There's fourteen pages of forwarded email addresses, each new header separated with aghast comments that each recipient adds. When you get to the main email, it's nothing but crudely photoshopped pictures of Palin with her head stuck on sleazy bodies. Then there are a couple more of some young blonde girl you assume to be her daughter, holding bottles of booze and shotguns, and kissing other girls. The email asks if this is who we want to lead our country, and everybody is just SHOCKED.
The photos aren't of Bristol, nor does the girl in them even resemble her. And why would a rifle-brandishing Sarah Palin from ALASKA be standing next to OUTDOOR POOL in a flag bikini?
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We are so gullible. I said 'We'. I fall for it occasionally as well. Five minutes of fact-checking will reveal that 99.999% of all of these "revelation" emails aren't just wrong... they're so laughably ridiculously wrong that it's.. well, ridiculous. And yet we give them one quick glance, *GASP*, and then send them to fourteen other people that NEED TO KNOW these unbelievable things that somehow slipped past the media's attention.
Sometimes I question free will.
Now, I straight-up can't wrap my head around $700 billion, so that sounded pretty plausible. Also, the guy telling me this is a financial whiz kid with degrees in accounting and finance who practically grows money on trees. I figure if he was that alarmed, then so should I be as well. I started getting really pissed off.
But... this is the internet, you know, and he got this "revelation" through chain spam.
I just checked on the US Census Bureau's website. Their latest statistic (from 2006) puts the number people in the US who are 18 or older as 225,633,342. Divide $700 billion by that, and you get only $3102 for each adult.
---
It's just like those emails I've been getting about Sarah Palin. There's fourteen pages of forwarded email addresses, each new header separated with aghast comments that each recipient adds. When you get to the main email, it's nothing but crudely photoshopped pictures of Palin with her head stuck on sleazy bodies. Then there are a couple more of some young blonde girl you assume to be her daughter, holding bottles of booze and shotguns, and kissing other girls. The email asks if this is who we want to lead our country, and everybody is just SHOCKED.
The photos aren't of Bristol, nor does the girl in them even resemble her. And why would a rifle-brandishing Sarah Palin from ALASKA be standing next to OUTDOOR POOL in a flag bikini?
---
We are so gullible. I said 'We'. I fall for it occasionally as well. Five minutes of fact-checking will reveal that 99.999% of all of these "revelation" emails aren't just wrong... they're so laughably ridiculously wrong that it's.. well, ridiculous. And yet we give them one quick glance, *GASP*, and then send them to fourteen other people that NEED TO KNOW these unbelievable things that somehow slipped past the media's attention.
Sometimes I question free will.
posted by Grover at 9/28/2008 12:30:00 PM
1 Comments:
That bill makes me ill.
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