Everywhere I go and in everything I read today, I see the absence of logic. There's a chaotic blur of facts. Look at the news:
On Yahoo there's usually news headlines that generally use stories written by the Associated Press and Reuters; it's really good and I love it by the way so don't take this the wrong way. Most articles, especially during the day, cater to office workers. They talk about jobs that pay during "the recession." They talk about Obama's latest minute goal. They also write a lot about climate change. So it appears that Yahoo samples a wide variety of news articles. In this wide variety of articles, there's a major consistency, mumbo jumbo.
In many of the articles, whether it be about science, business, law, or a combination of those categories the writers frequently just use technical terms and numbers without explaining their practical value that might not even be explained in fancy technical jargon. For instance, if GDP growth is -3%, no one cares unless they know what that means. For practical purposes, say it means that the country can only 97% of what it could before. The problem is that commodities don't uniformly depreciate/appreciate in value. So even though a lot of people owe money on their homes, they might be able to buy cheaper cars and buy other homes for even cheaper prices. Numbers of dollars only matter when you know how it relates to getting healthcare, paying tuition, and buying commodities. So rather than reporting just with numbers, they should write if it's getting easier or harder for Americans to buy houses and cars. Plus, stats can be extremely misleading.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment