by David Woodby, Editor "There are three kinds of untruths in this world. There's Lies, there's Damned Lies, and there's Statistics." attributed to Benjamin Disraeli by Mark Twain. I have said before, statistics are a wonderful tool for looking at "the big picture." The problem with "the big picture" is that is so huge that the conclusions one draws from them simply don't work at a lower level; as a matter of fact, they are usually presented in such a way as to prove the point of the presenter. In the hands of someone more interested in proving their point, statistics can be manipulated to prove anything the speaker wants you to believe. Think not? Try it for yourself. 100% of all people die (with a statistical variance of plus or minus .0000000099% based upon your religious beliefs.) In order to be considered a person, one has to be at least conceived to qualify. Therefore, according to statistical analysis, the number one cause of death worldwide, is birth. From that figure, one can reasonably conclude that by preventing the birth of persons, we can eliminate birth as the number one cause of death...although I daresay it wouldn't be to anyone's advantage, since there would soon be no left to celebrate mankind's victory over death. Angioplasties and arteriosclerosis are facts that most of us have to face as we grow older. Millions of people the world over owe their lives to the group of medical personnel that have developed and practice the angioplasty procedure, myself included. This procedure is highly effective, the recovery period is very short, and the results are unbelievably good. Your cardiologist, and mine is the best of the best, will explain to you in great detail what he or she is about to do to you, how you will feel, what you will feel, the pretests, the tests, the procedure, and the tools used to do it. You will almost begin to feel |
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you can do it yourself. The point of this little detour to angioplasties relates back to statistics. The same cardiologist who has been so careful to cover every small detail, specifically including the tools used for the procedure, will look you right in the eye and tell you that Chelation Therapy WILL NOT WORK because the plaque causing the hardening of the arteries is INSIDE the cell walls of the arteries. This is the same concerned physician who moments ago explained that one of the risks of angioplasty was that plaque could break loose from the cell wall, travel into your heart, and cause stroke or myocardial infarction. This is by no means an indictment of angioplasties or cardiologists
I am still alive because in the right hands (May God Bless you Dr. Ayoubi) angioplasty works. It is, however, simply one more glaring example that statistics tell you what your presenter wants you to hear. Our poor old penny, much maligned, has a startling effect upon our economy. Hard to believe that that worthless little object that means so little to so many people that it is literally thrown away, on the ground around convenience stores and grocery stores. It gets left in the bottom of our pockets, we stash them in our dressers, we find them inunder the cushions in the couch. They must be such a nuisance, jingling in our pockets reminding us they really are too much trouble to fool with. And everyone knows that our taxes are based on parts of pennies like the "mil" they use to figure our property taxes, and the half cent, like the tax we just voted down in Bay County for improvements in our schools. You know, expenditures that would have included construction jobs for the next few years, purchases of building materials such as concrete, lumber, insulation, piping, steel, roofing materials, paint, wallpaper, and nails.
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And the money earned from those jobs that provide more taxes for the county, the money spent by the carpenters, roofers, concrete contractors, general contractors, laborers, plumbers and electricians on other goods and services, like food, housing, clothing, oh, and did I mention taxes, which would be paid on all of the above, again to Bay County? Never mind that only a couple hundred thousand of us live here, the bulk of the money paid into that tax fund would have been people who do NOT live here, about 6.5 million of them visit the beach every year and spend money on food, lodging, entertainment, groceries, oh, and did I mention taxes? But that's ok, we showed em who's boss. Out of the roughly 200,000 current residents of Bay County , only 20,000 of us bothered to even vote ...and the vote was decided by less than 200 people. Well, at least we are free to throw those pennies on the Each set of statistics is compiled with other statistics gathered locally, regionally, and nationally. There is no hard and fast set of rules by which each set is gathered. We have Harris Polls, we have polls |
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conducted by Nielson to tell us what WE want to see on television..10,000 sidewalk, NOBODY is gonna take em away from US, we are smarter than that. OK folks time to tie all this together. people we do not know tell us what 340,000,000 people REALLY think. We have polls conducted by major corporations which all tell us THEIR product is best, and it's what we really want anyway. We have housing statistics, sales, new building, price indexes, you name it, there is a study for it...but once it is all gathered together and combined, it is worthless to a local economy. Why? Because some areas grow when others do not. Some people leave one area of the country and move to anothersome people make good decisions and some don't. The tax issue in the last paragraph should have told you how huge a bad decision about what seems like nothing (half |
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pennies) can be. It should also convince you that not all taxes are bad, especially when they are sought to make our home a better place for others to come to live. We decide whether we have a local recession or not through our own actions and beliefs. We can sit back and let the national news media and the government convince us we are headed for a recession, or we can take direct, positive action to minimize the effect any such so called recession CAN have on us.
Yes, there are things we can only affect, not change, like the price of gasoline. But we can limit the extortion of the Gas Pirates by using our excellent Mass Transit, by driving our cars less, by using scooters, and by car pooling. We aren't stupid, we are careless.
Let the rest of the world have a recession, we don't have to. And remember, "It ain't a recession til WE say it's a recession." |
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