KBW, just the facts, Man.

You never read in the National Geographic that only ten percent of Americans believe in evolution, because that was never true at any time in your lifetime, and I don’t think the National Geographic would print something so obviously false on the face of it. I don’t believe that Pew Research is going to take a poll and then lie about it. I dismiss that idea out of hand.

I note that you said you read that ‘some time ago,’ which is a little hard to place, to me that phrase would mean at least five, maybe ten years ago. You know, at my age I am not so much worried about the things that happened that I don’t remember, as I am about the things that I remember that never happened. Anything I remember as having heard ten or more years ago, and not since, I generally need to double check that information.

And you are absolutely right, it didn’t have much bearing on your argument, you could have said many Americans don’t believe in evolution and your argument would have been just as valid. I do that all the time when I have only a vague memory of a number and don’t want to wade into the internet.

I have probably told the story before but maybe five years ago I got into an argument with this guy about immigration. There are two sides to this and you know which side I was on and we were going at it in a brisk manner, and then he said that crime was soaring on the US side of the border, which I have read often was not the case. Crime is soaring on the Mexican side of the border but the drug guys keep it there because they don’t want no trouble with us.

Well here is the thing, he could have argued that immigration is overall a burden on the US economy. I don’t agree with that, but there are arguments to be made on either side. But the crime rate on the US side of the border is a verifiable fact, just check the police reports. The whole gentlemanly tenor of the argument changed for the worst. Maybe I should get an iphone after all and google it for my argument and show the guy, but you know he probably would have said I was having a problem with my batteries or something.

See facts are the basis, the axioms of my scientific Betterworldism, this is how science works, you start with the facts and you build from there, but if you have an untrue fact in there somewhere my whole bold edifice collapses. If you say the Russians are by nature nasty people we can argue about that. If you say Death Valley is in the middle of Russia, I have a problem.

That thing about us running the world is just a joke, just a levity thing I throw in when I feel myself getting a little too heated. Not everybody would be happy with KBW (Ken’s Better World). Probably logically it makes no sense for those CEOs to be getting those science fiction salaries so that would be a thing of the past which would not make them happy. I guess the ideal would be the altruistic one of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, which is pretty vague, and there are holes in it.

What I meant by money never existing was in the sense of GE stocks plummeting, and the shareholders wondering where their money went, and the answer is it didn’t go anywhere, it only existed in the first place in the minds of people who at one time thought the company was worth a lot of money and then later decided that it wasn’t. Likewise the US dollar which was once a solid coin and then became a piece of paper, and now is just numbers in the cloud. If everybody woke up next morning and decided that it wasn’t worth anything, it wouldn’t be.

Not that I am going to be emptying my wallet over the balcony, I can still buy myself a pale ale and an Italian Beef. Maybe the value of the dollar is like classic physics where everything makes common sense, and what you call the new physics where once you get close to the speed of light everything goes to hell.

I don’t quite follow your explanation of how that extra nickel per burger goes to a corporation rather than the government (too many variables which may or may not come into play). But I like your statement about how those guys who advertise low prices pay their employees so little that we taxpayers have to subsidize their food purchases and health insurance. And this is something we have to pay whether we take advantage of those low prices or not.

I was speaking of corporations being corrupt. Whether they get bailed out by the government or not, they are still corrupt. But there is a problem separating corps from gov, in that the corps run a lot of the gov.

I don’t know about those bailouts. On the one hand a lot of crooks went scot free, but on the other hand if we had let the bankers and GM go down the tubes, would that have had a catastrophic event on related corps and sent our whole economy into the dustbin? If that’s true it’s probably best we did it, if not, we probably shouldn’t have. But how can we know? I don’t know.