She called last night, very excited, to say she landed a job selling whole-house air filters evenings and weekends. She says there's a base salary that will cover her rent and utilities, plus bonuses. Training is today through Friday so - she isn't flying home this weekend. She thinks perhaps in May. So much for the Excel chart.

She sounded excited enough that I think the job is real. Do companies pay salaries of $26,000 plus bonuses at entry-level for selling air filters at pre-booked appointments on evenings and weekends? Is this plausible?

parts of it sound plausible. In bold


/buzzkill

Whatever you do, don't buy a whole house air filter. Who needs that? You probably already have a filter as part of your HVAC system. In fact, it's probably dirty and in need of changing. I know ours is.

Yeahhh ... I know.

Hmmm...

Attachment 42908
Attachment 42909

AmmoLand says these are both United Nations maps.

The data may well be from the UN, but how they choose to group the data is up to them.

Especially, not the murder rates in the second graph. The first category is 0 to 5 per 100,000. This puts the entire OECD in one category, lime green. So (numbers from memory here) Australia's 1.2 per 100,000 and the US's 4.8 per 100,000 are made to look the same, when one is four times as much as the other.

So ... half truth. Homicide rates are a result of *many* factors - economic factors, social cohesion, effectiveness of police, cultural practices, medical facilities AND availability of means to kill. Focus on the OECD only, rejig the colour scale to give better resolution at the OECD end of the data, and you'd find the US not quite so rosy after all.

Just in case we have a false vision of ourselves.

Holy shit.

I'd like to see a timeline of that, showing which war, when.

Also, there is *opportunity* for statistical shennanigans. The Korean war only ever saw a truce / ceasefire, not a peace treaty, so technically, that war is still ongoing. It'd be BS to count it, though.

Indian wars and banana wars fill in a lot of "blank" years. The Quasi War was with the French Republic. The Sabine Expedition was against Mexico.

For timeline look at-
http://www.loonwatch.com/2011/12/we-...en-since-1776/

It's some bullshit definition of "war", including 6 years of Vietnam before any troops were actually sent there.

War on drugs, war on drunk driving, war on poverty, war on crabgrass. :rolleyes:

We had military advisers there from 1950 on, but that is a stretch.

Ah, I suspected as much. Enter debate on what counts as "war". I remember three blokes from Texas declared the state independent, and then a few weeks later announced a permanent ceasefire in the "international struggle for the nation of Texas". :right: Does that count?

Still, if you go through and remove all the dubious cases, there's still an awful lot of war there.

Yeah, that was aid to the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys. ;)

Naaaahh...We're rosy as fuck.

:p:

*************************