Last weekI beat on the silly $3 quadrillion story for its lack of context and perspective. It’s the kind of story that brings out the stupid and of course it did just that as Oyster points out. In his postOyster calls the matter of aMr Vandeleun’s stupid to the attention of Ashley Morris in hope that Ashley will deliver his “trademark subtelty and finesse” to one Mr. Vanderleun.Ashley in turn delivers and I highly recommend reading all of it but here is a taste…
He calls New Orleanians “legions of hustlers, grifters, drunks, junkies, pathics and drooling layabouts“.
Hmmm…I wonder which of us he’s talking about. People like me, with a
PhD and two jobs? Others on my blogroll, with JDs, PhDs, MBAs, MDs,
MFAs, and other advanced degrees? Oh, that’s right. He’s one of those
who probably couldn’t cut it, and so his ‘conservative‘ response is to slam the ‘liberal bent in higher education‘
and denigrate our achievements. People in New Orleans are working
harder than anyone, jackass, regardless of educational level. If you
only have one job (and I don’t know a PhD in this town that only has
one job), then you probably spend the rest of your time fixing up your
house. Yes, we’re still doing it. Most of the gutting is over, but
people are still hanging drywall, painting, hauling off debris,
patching roofs and in general rebuilding their homes and lives. There’s
also little affordable childcare, so our kids are either helping us
with the work, or else we have to postpone the rebuilding time until
after the kids are in bed. So, for clarification Mookie, does that make
us “pathics” or “drooling layabouts“?I love how people who have no grasp of mathematics, statistics, or
even simple arithmetic still try to use numbers to help support their
points. The twit who sued for $3 Quadrillion is what we call anoutlier.
We don’t consider him when determining weighted averages. He won’t make
a big difference when calculating the median. But that doesn’t stop
Mookie from using thisoutlier to cipher an average. As we say about the lottery, it is a tax on those who failed statistics.
Mookie must direct deposit his paycheck to the lottery, and picks the
same numbers, week after clueless week after clueless week.
I am the world’s most hopeless person when it comes to mathematics — I have at least one math-related learning disability, and it’s taken me the better part of 20 years to get my head around the extreme basics of algebra; when I get tired enough, I can’t add or subtract (let alone multiply or divide) without using a calculator, and even that’s dicey; and I barely understand geometry at all…
EvenI understand probability and statistics well enough to know the difference between an outlier and the body of data you use when calculating an average (mean or median, anyway) and the difference between one instance of an occurrence and a set of occurrences within a population. Yeesh…
And how many metro areas are clear of the drifters, druggies, drunks, hustlers, etc?
If I can find data that there are drunks in NYC, can we get all the aid back that we mistakenly gave them for 9/11 before we realized that they aren’t pure?
Scout, that is one of the worst ones I have read in a while. The other one that Oyster linked to is just as bad. It feels so weird to read all those awful comments and to know that these people are directing all that hate right down here to . . . us. It’s so sad to me because, while I am unscathed, I know that the future already holds many unknowns for many here. We are all working very hard and dealing with much uncertainty. Some things are going great, and some things suck. You know how wonderful New Orleans is, and how worth it. One encouraging thing is that I have met an amazing number of people who came here after the flood because, even with all that crap going on, they thought New Orleans would be a great place for them to live. It is. They love it. It’s hard to know that there exists a large chunk of Americans that would like to see us gone.