Bill Ryan's Other Blog

Thakns to PeaceChicken for the good idea 

My reason for writing today actually has to do with this recent news. See, I still owe you guys quite a bit of money for my student loan. Now, I know you don’t like to positively reinforce your responsible borrowers who make their payments on time and in-full every month, but please hear me out.

Since my tax money is now being funneled to you (my calculations conclude $326 billion divided by the estimated 99,880,223 Americans who the IRS has deemed liable to pay taxes equals $3,264 per taxpayer) — surely I won’t be expected to pay Citibank over $3,000 indirectly by way of the bailout on top of the thousands I already owe you? That’s terribly unethical and I know your business would never compromise its moral standards just to make a buck.

So, I look forward to getting my updated loan balance with this amount subtracted. I can see why you bankers are so addicted to these bailouts, it’s such a load off my back!

Sincerely,
Acct. Number 19840033
Loyal usury victim since 2001

P.S. I’m sending a Thank You card to my nephews to thank them for sacrificing their future financial freedom in exchange for our American way of life and patriotic call to live beyond our means. I’ve included it with this letter, will you sign it too? Thanks, it would mean a lot!

[tags]Citibank, Citibank Bailout [/tags]

One thing I think everyone in this country (and everyone who uses email) can agree on is that SPAM is a bad thing. It clogs email servers, wastes bandwidth, makes us have to go through SPAM filters or go through endless Challenge/Response mechanisms etc etc etc etc etc etc. And on top of it all, it’s B.S.  No matter how dire you’re straights are, if you’re willing to send $8.00 a pop to enlarge your P3n1s you’re crazy. If you think you can get something that through legitimate channels cost $8.00 a pill for $0.35 from Canada via Burundi you’re just stoopid. And if you’d actually eat the stuff, you’re just suicidal. And if you substitute (fill in the blank after) w/ “to ______________ your ________” the same argument will pretty much hold. SPAM didn’t get to be this pervasive b/c it never worked but those days are long gone (and even then you were a dummy if you responded to them). And even though it’s next to impossible get a room of 20 people to agree 100% on anything let alone a country of 301,139,147, I’m pretty sure everyone who’d respond to a survey would agree that SPAM is for suckers.

And if you bring the subject up, people will invariably have a strong opinion about SPAM. They’ll frequently engage in feeble attempts at humor like I did above with quips like “Well, I like my P3n15 just the way it is”. They’ll continue to talk about their ‘favorite’ spam and try additional snarky comments like “Yah, like I”m stupid enough to believe Idi Amin really wants to send me 5 billion dollars if I just send him a pre-addressed stamped envelope with ______”. It will often result in a fairly long conversation going through the latest SPAM subjects items by items.

UNLESS the SPAM email is the Chain Email done by the guy who’s really bad at math and apparently is the only guy in America that has a version of Windows without Calculator built into it.  The email in question has various versions and came out a few weeks ago back when the bailout numbers were less than 1/10th of what they are now but the mail says something like this:

“The bailout is for $700B. There are roughly 300,000,000 people in the U.S.  If you divide that you get $400,000 per person.  If we did that, everyone could either pay off their mortgage or a significant portion of it and for the vast majority of people, pay off their credit cards, cars, boats and a heck of a lot of other debt too.” And for a fraction of a second it sounds like a reasonable approach.  If you engage at all in critical thinking you’ll double check the numbers b/c something sounds wrong and you’ll quickly see what the problem is. Or so you’d think.

The reason I’m writing about this isn’t b/c I feel I’m the first one to pick up on this.  The reason I’m writing about this is b/c I’ve heard it constantly over and over since back when it was $700B.  Now the total package looms at close to $8 TRILLION dollars so using the same logic, that’d bump things up by a multiple of 10.  Using the earlier numbers, that means roughly $4 million per person.  Heck, unless you’re really in serious debt, that ought to cover your mortgage, car notes, credit cards, student loans and still have a fortune left over.

So everyone agrees SPAM is stupid yet I hear this crap being spouted left and right. Since when did SPAM not become stupid b/c it was a CHAIN EMAIL instead of a plea from Robert Mugabe’s Butler? If you have access to Email then you have access to SNOPES in all likelihood. You have access to a calculator.  And if you run the numbers, a different story is told:

Total Proposed Expenditures:                 $7.8 Trillion

# of Citizens in US:                                     301,139,147

$ per Citizen:                                              $25, 902

It took me about 10 seconds to do this and immediately it started to make ‘sense’.  Now if you play with the imputs you’ll get slightly different variations but here’s the bigger point. This email spread like wildfire back when it was ‘only’ $700B. Back then the $ per Citizen was just under $3k. Because the numbers involve so many 0′s, it’s all math you can do in seconds on a sheet of paper. Faster if you have a calculator. It’s amazing that people decide they’ll look really smart by spouting crap like this but never worry about looking stupid by getting fooled so easily. They’re comfortable calling in Talk Radio and TV shows left and right all the while forgetting it came in a CHAIN EMAIL and well, sounds ridiculous. The worst part is that when they call into Talk shows, they almost always try to play it off like they’ve done the math. I’ve heard the exact same quote over and over “So stick with me here….blah blah blah, and there’s roughly 300B people, what’s a few billion between friends ha, ha , hah, that leaves just somewhere south of 400,000   per person. I’m off by a few bucks b/c I don’t have a calculator handy but for 400k I can ___________________ followed by a list of items that allows them to beat the point into the ground. The whole thing involves a bunch of little word drops to make it sound like it’s their thought to begin with, and that they actually did the math and figured this out. (I know, if they called and said “I got a Chain Email Spam that said..” no one would take it seriously). What’s worse is that depending on their political persuasion, it allows them to make a bigger political statement. I keep hearing crap like “But the govt would never allow you to do that. Why? Because that would give you YOUR money back and we can’t have that.”  Or on the other hand “Because that means that the people, not powerful and corporations and lobbyists control the money and we can’t have that”  (I even heard a really strained “Because” that tied things back to “Bush’s illegal war”

We’ve all probably laughed at a coworker who adamantly tells you the email he just sent you from Cracker Barrel has a tracking device embedded in it by Bill Gates and they’re racking up tons of free money yet how in the world do we not ridicule these people 100X worse?  The only thing I can think of is that the main people spouting this are callers to TV/Radio shows as opposed to coworkers.

But man, it’s bad enough that they are flooding the airwaves proving they got taken by a really lame Internet hoax.  It’s even worse that they are trying to play it off as original thought. And it’s freaking horrific that they are using this to try to make some larger political point about, well, politics.

I brutally ridicule everyone who sends me a Chain Email so I guess that’s why I haven’t gotten it yet. But I heard three different calls to Coast2CoastAM and/or Rollye James spouting this nonsense. Given a choice between enlarging your P3n15 or building your political philosophy on it, I’d rather go for the enlargement