I got my monthly copy of Money magazine today....which had a spread covering the best "small towns" in America....from 50,000 to 300,000.
The curious thing about this 100 city listing....NOT one single town from Mississippi, Alabama or Georgia. I just kinda sat there and laughed.
Then they wanted you to know the best overall small town.....was Plymouth, Minn. I kinda sat there.....knowing a guy from that region from years ago. He talked on and on how miserable it was in December and January.....cold as heck.....lots of snow....and real winters lasted five months. He vowed never to go back and permanently live there.....yet this town is picked as number one?
The rest of the top ten were also sad stories for various reasons. Whichever idiot works for Money, and does projects like this.....must be sipping alot of beer in the afternoon and fudging the numbers. I'd also advise these guys to actually visit the town and see for themselves.
How could those fools not include Muscle Shoals or Ripley or Huntsville?
Thursday, 24 July 2008
A Million Germans Lost in the Digital World
There was a quiet repair job done this past week here in Germany.
The guys in charges of numbers....did alot of figuring and came to the rational fact that only 82.1 million Germans really exist.....which is 1 million less Germans than previously thought.
So, how does a country screw up like this?
Well, there is this rule.....you want to move from this house you live in.....to another house in a town 2 miles away...then you "DEREGISTER" from the old townhall, and then "REREGISTER" at the new townhall. Even if you moved from your apartment on one street, to another street five hundred feet away.....you still have to deregister and then reregister. Its a stupid process....but the method that the cops know precisely where you live.....ifing they have to arrest you this afternoon.
So the computer dudes discovered, after blasting all the data in a massive search.....that duplicate guys existed. Yep.....they moved to the new town, and registered.....but never deregistered from the old village. So that town kept claiming they had 12,001 folks but the truth is that since you left....they were really 12,000. In fact.....they aren't admitting it....but some folks might have moved five or six times.....and never deregistered.....so they might have one guy representing over five other images of himself in the national database.
For statistics folks, this is a highly amusing episode.....the kind where you'd go over and sip a dozen beers and laugh about this with the political hacks who will have laugh too.
So a million folks disappeared digitally off the face of the earth. Never again......flushed to eternity. You have to wonder......if these dudes had never done this analysis and flushed the data.....and kept going.....by 2050.....they would have been five or six million off-track. So luckily, it was only 1 million folks flushed.
The guys in charges of numbers....did alot of figuring and came to the rational fact that only 82.1 million Germans really exist.....which is 1 million less Germans than previously thought.
So, how does a country screw up like this?
Well, there is this rule.....you want to move from this house you live in.....to another house in a town 2 miles away...then you "DEREGISTER" from the old townhall, and then "REREGISTER" at the new townhall. Even if you moved from your apartment on one street, to another street five hundred feet away.....you still have to deregister and then reregister. Its a stupid process....but the method that the cops know precisely where you live.....ifing they have to arrest you this afternoon.
So the computer dudes discovered, after blasting all the data in a massive search.....that duplicate guys existed. Yep.....they moved to the new town, and registered.....but never deregistered from the old village. So that town kept claiming they had 12,001 folks but the truth is that since you left....they were really 12,000. In fact.....they aren't admitting it....but some folks might have moved five or six times.....and never deregistered.....so they might have one guy representing over five other images of himself in the national database.
For statistics folks, this is a highly amusing episode.....the kind where you'd go over and sip a dozen beers and laugh about this with the political hacks who will have laugh too.
So a million folks disappeared digitally off the face of the earth. Never again......flushed to eternity. You have to wonder......if these dudes had never done this analysis and flushed the data.....and kept going.....by 2050.....they would have been five or six million off-track. So luckily, it was only 1 million folks flushed.
A Year Ahead
This week....an amazing thing happened in the US.....a year ahead of what folks expected.
We now generate more energy via wind energy.....than Germany. They may have more capacity.....but the experts readily admit that the amount of wind we have.....is stronger than what you'd see in Germany....so we are ahead.
We make almost 1.2 percent of our power out of the wind......and folks out in Texas are proud of the fact that their region is the "wind funnel" of America.....with Kansas and Colorado behind them. The odds are that we will double our capacity within eighteen months.
We now generate more energy via wind energy.....than Germany. They may have more capacity.....but the experts readily admit that the amount of wind we have.....is stronger than what you'd see in Germany....so we are ahead.
We make almost 1.2 percent of our power out of the wind......and folks out in Texas are proud of the fact that their region is the "wind funnel" of America.....with Kansas and Colorado behind them. The odds are that we will double our capacity within eighteen months.
People of Berlin.....
So a brief review of the Obama speech in Berlin.
You people in Berlin are lucky....if you could vote....he'd be president....but since you can't....you might want to think about the guys who can vote.
There wasn't a mention for the guy in Jackson, Mississippi who'd like social security to be fixed.
There wasn't a word for the guy in Alabama who's been waiting for lower taxes.
There wasn't a word for the guy in Austin who owns a house and is in serious job jeopardy and may not be able to afford the $1400 a month that he was foolish to sign himself up for in terms of a mortgage.
There isn't a single part of this speech that really attracts a independent voter in America. This is the speech which was supposed to "JFK-ize" the German public to his side. But it doesn't do much for American voters and I'm thinking the video clips will be used with the Love Parade and Hitler to make a point about Germans and their vision of the world
So thats pretty much the state of this speech.
Oh, and the visit that Obama was going to make to Landstuhl to see wounded GI's.....cancelled. No reason given. If you asked me personally.....the hospital couldn't guarantee several thousand GIs in mass to give a strong appearance. At some point, the handlers likely made a decision that the image wasn't what they wanted.....so drop it. Just my humble opinion.
You people in Berlin are lucky....if you could vote....he'd be president....but since you can't....you might want to think about the guys who can vote.
There wasn't a mention for the guy in Jackson, Mississippi who'd like social security to be fixed.
There wasn't a word for the guy in Alabama who's been waiting for lower taxes.
There wasn't a word for the guy in Austin who owns a house and is in serious job jeopardy and may not be able to afford the $1400 a month that he was foolish to sign himself up for in terms of a mortgage.
There isn't a single part of this speech that really attracts a independent voter in America. This is the speech which was supposed to "JFK-ize" the German public to his side. But it doesn't do much for American voters and I'm thinking the video clips will be used with the Love Parade and Hitler to make a point about Germans and their vision of the world
So thats pretty much the state of this speech.
Oh, and the visit that Obama was going to make to Landstuhl to see wounded GI's.....cancelled. No reason given. If you asked me personally.....the hospital couldn't guarantee several thousand GIs in mass to give a strong appearance. At some point, the handlers likely made a decision that the image wasn't what they wanted.....so drop it. Just my humble opinion.
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