"Do the math" is a great idea.
Will you, Ansel , and other Slog writers, promise to do that?
I'd like to see you do it - would help all of our discussions.

As to the Doctor...uh...are you sure she graduated? Such lack of arithmetic -- it's not "mathematics" for god's sake -- is a bit troubling.

In fact if Slog writers simply asked "Did I do the math?" on every story ( where it applies of course) Slog would be leap to top 1% of all media.

No joke.

Well, the Takers don't deserve any of it, and that's 47% of Merica, so the number goes up to, like, $8 each.

I grew up in pre 1974 Britain, where a billion was a million times a million, not a thousand times a million. Sometimes, not everything is bigger in Texas.

To be fair, a "billion" in Europe is 1000 times larger than the United State's billion (a million million, 10^12, instead of a thousand million, 10^9) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_s…

That said... $4.33 * 1000 ≠ poverty solved

I saw this too. Good god. I am embarrassed for people.

Facebook doesn't create stupidity, it reveals it.

This isn't just a math problem, it makes no economic sense. The US treasury could just theoretically give everyone a bajillion gazillion dollars. It's kind of disconcerting that it takes anyone more than a few seconds to think about why this wouldn't be a good idea.

What @7 said.
Social media is changing people (because everything that happens to everyone all the time changes everyone all the time), but more than changing people social media is amplifying people. Everyone has a platform. And every stupid thing any one says gets broadcast.

Can I have my 4 bucks now?

It gets dumber. Just saw the same phrase on FB, superimposed on a photo of Bernie Sanders.

@5, there's a small chance the person who made the original image made the mistake for that reason, but there is no excuse for an American who knows that when Powerball says $1.3 billion they mean $1,300,000,000.

Ah, journalism. What for most people would be a random comment on FB quickly forgotten, in the hands of a JOURNALIST it becomes something worthy enough to consult an editor upon, and then offered as some profound realization.

Yeah, Ansel, FB makes people stupid. You now think a small pointless incident is so amazing, it must be shared with the world.

Do you frame your poops as well?

Oh for the love god. This is an old J.D. Rockefeller story.

Activist rages at J.D. that he should share his wealth equally with the needy. So J.D. gives him a dollar.

Likely this... gag? observation has been going on for centuries.

Yawn.

so you think "a brilliant person—Ivy League-trained, doctor, do-gooder." looks stupid because of "why not?"

why do people bring rocks inside glass houses? why not?

Perhaps more importantly - once you point out to someone that their Facebook post it's false or a hoax, virtually no one seems to take it down. Can someone explain that part to me?

@15: Ah, a lesson in stupidity from the guy who thinks cattle ranching is no worse for the land than grazing by wild bison, who thinks consumer protection laws are ridiculous, and just can't imagine how microstamping bullets could help anything. Truly you are a sage among us on this vaunted topic.

I blame calculators. Not really, but this is another example of why teaching math is important. Yes, you can do arithmetic with a calculator, but it is really important to ask yourself if the answer you get makes sense. A lottery sum (even a huge one) solving poverty? That seems like a stretch. Better double or triple check your math on that one.

I will say people have trouble with millions, billions and trillions. The numbers are huge, and we have trouble relating. The city gets sued for a few million. A tunnel costs a couple billion. A stupid war costs a trillion. It is all so big that it is hard to wrap your head around it.

So breaking it down on a per person basis is a great way to go, but you have to do the math right. For example, Seattle has about 650,000 people. So, three times that is around 2 million. (Double check: 650,000 is a bit less than a million, so three of those should be a few million -- yep). OK, now a million times a thousand is a billion (in America). So, 3 * 1,000 * every person in Seattle = around two billion. This new tunnel we are building costs three grand for every person in Seattle.

Now lets do it with the Iraq War. Round up the American population to 333 million. Times 3 is a billion. Times a thousand is a trillion. This means that we could send a $3,000.00 check to every man, woman and child in America instead of invading Iraq and creating ISIS. Oh well.

@18: I say we take that money, convert it to pennies, and then drop the huge penny bags right onto ISIS. A big bag full of pennies dropping from a few miles up would be pretty destructive.

Then, the civilians could collect the pennies and rebuild! Win/Win!

@17 lol you don't realize how much your comment says about you. hows your rock collection coming along?

@20: Weeell, it was my advisor who collected these particular rocks. I'm just dissolving them in hydrochloric acid, sieving and washing the resulting sediment, picking out the fossils, and mounting and photographing the remains of a certain species of trilobite. (Other species of trilobite, along with bryozoans, gastropods, and conodonts, just get stored away against the day that someone might decide to use them in a research project.) You know, the sort of thing paleontologists do.
How does it feel to know that you're reinforcing the hurtful stereotype of rural Americans as ignorant and uneducated windbags?

lmao. what would us ignorant and uneducated country folk ever do without you city slickers.

@22: You wouldn't have any tractors, so farmers would still be using horses or oxen for plowing and harvesting. You also wouldn't have modern veterinary medicine, so brucellosis and TB would be big problems for you in particular, Mr. Cattleman. And good luck selling your crops without an urban demand for them.
So yeah, cities depend on rural folk for food and certain raw materials (such as lumber). What do the cities provide? Technology, heavy industry, all sorts of advancements that set our civilization apart from hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers. Oh, and we keep you guys in business.

And as I keep telling you, I am a PALEONTOLOGIST. We play in the dirt when it's time to do some fieldwork, and we're not afraid to shit in the woods if there're specimens to collect. You want to bitch about prissy little city slickers? Go whine to a geophysicist.

you've been CAMPING and SHIT... IN THE WOODS!? how can i ever compete with that impressively rugged display of tenacity in the face of uncomfortable situations? did you use leaves to wipe with? roflmfao

@24: Nah, we brought TP with us like civilized humans.
You want to try the fieldwork experience? Go out into the badlands and sleep in a tent. Easy enough. Now spend your days hiking across every scrubby hillside in the area, keeping a weather eye out for Jake the Snake, and trying to find minuscule fragments of fossilized bone sticking out of the dirt, the bone that looks just like every other pebble to the untrained eye. When you find a larger bone, you lie down to spend however long it takes painstakingly sealing it with epoxy, and then jacketing it with plaster bandages, and you better just hope there aren't too many yuccas or cacti around. If it's partially buried, clear away the overburden; this means shoveling dirt extremely carefully so as not to risk damaging your find.
Drink ludicrous amounts of water and Gatorade to account for the oppressive heat and the blistering aridity. It may rain, in which case you get desert rain, the sort that feels like hail coming down and traps you in your tent or under a tree or tarpaulin because all the trails turn to muck for a few hours. When you get back to camp, feast on canned chili and fruit cocktail. (Fruit cocktail is amazing after a day of prospecting.) Now do this for a few weeks on end, and if you're lucky you'll get a shower every now and again. And remember, this is something you went to university for and worked your fingers to the bone for the privilege of doing. When you're finally done, you pack everything up, gear and finds, and you lug it a few miles back from your base camp to the nearest dirt road. And let me just remind you that what you are lugging is ROCKS. (There will probably be a steep hill to climb along this hike; that hill is Motherfucker Hill, by convention.) Then you drive into the nearest town, take a quick shower to dislodge the worst of the sweat and grime, and celebrate with your teammates at a local saloon over steaks and beer. Then you go back home, resume your routine of lab work and other indoors forms of research, and wait for field season to roll around again, because nothing beats being out in the dirt with the bones and shells. Some people work on digs all summer, the lucky bastards.
THAT is what paleontologists do for fun (really for science, but it's fun as hell). Not a whole lot of other professions where you get a Ph.D. and still do that sort of thing as part of your job.

do i want to try fieldwork? i do field work everyday year round. you're the only participant in your pissing contest.

@26: I'm very sorry to hear that you don't have a home to sleep in or motor vehicles to drive around in. It must be hard to tend cattle like that.
You do it all year, but don't pretend yours is more grueling day-to-day. Have you ever taken a 500-pound slab of limestone and stood it on its edge in order to split it open, entirely by human exertion and in the rugged conditions of mountain desert? No? Well, that's one of us. I spent a couple weeks doing just that before I was even out of high school.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnkdNZ6y…