Are Americans a Broken People?
POSTED BY: SignyM
UPDATED: Tuesday, August 18, 2026 03:15
VIEWED: 19858
PAGE 17 of 29
Having re-read the OP the answer is still "yes"
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
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Americans have one irreducible power, and that's the vote. But they need to understand that voting isn't a one-time effort, or a 2-party fight. You need to vote - AND KEEP ON VOTING - for whoever represents your interests. If the democrats aren't doing the job, stop voting for them. If the republicans aren't doing the job, stop voting for them too. Give every new person a term to run them though their paces. After that, if they're not up to the task, vote for someone else.
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Quote:That is not actually a power. This is what power looks like: In the thirty-seven industrialized countries that make up the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), on average, the top decile has about as much wealth as the bottom nine deciles put together. In the United States, the top decile has about four times as much wealth as the bottom nine. Owning four times more is what real power is about. Makes it easy to go for five times more, and six times more.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Americans have one irreducible power, and that's the vote.
https://lithub.com/who-are-the-9-9-percent-a-closer-look-at-the-math-o
f-american-inequality/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The countries that have better ratios got there by voting.
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Quote:No. The people of those countries picked a side then stayed on that side decade after decade: either the side that shouted it wanted to make the rich less rich or the side that didn't (which would be everywhere but U.K. and U.S.A.)
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
The countries that have better ratios got there by voting.
I will add that the rich in all countries are very capable of finding spokesmen to confuse voters about which political parties want to make the rich less rich.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How many times do I have to school you on Zipf's Law?
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Quote:Zipf's law states that given a large sample of words used, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. So word number n has a frequency proportional to 1/n. Thus the most frequent word will occur about twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc. For example, in one sample of words in the English language, the most frequently occurring word, "the", accounts for nearly 7% of all the words (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's Law, the second-place word "of" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by "and" (28,852). Only about 135 words are needed to account for half the sample of words in a large sample.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
How many times do I have to school you on Zipf's Law?
Zipf himself proposed that neither speakers nor hearers using a given language want to work any harder than necessary to reach understanding, and the process that results in approximately equal distribution of effort leads to the observed Zipf distribution.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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And 10% of the people who worked at any place I ever worked did 90% of the work.
That's a constant you're going to find everywhere.
Unfortunately, we live in a society where we seem to think that "above average" intelligence means "smart".
It doesn't. Average intelligence is fucking dumb. The top 10% of us have to deal with the 90% of the rest of you dumbasses, and it's super annoying.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Quote:That is NOT Zipf's Law, 6ix. You're telling a joke: "Ninety percent of Americans think they are above average."
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
And 10% of the people who worked at any place I ever worked did 90% of the work.
That's a constant you're going to find everywhere.
Unfortunately, we live in a society where we seem to think that "above average" intelligence means "smart".
It doesn't. Average intelligence is fucking dumb. The top 10% of us have to deal with the 90% of the rest of you dumbasses, and it's super annoying.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
That is NOT Zipf's Law, 6ix.
Yes it is.
Quote:
You're telling a joke: "Ninety percent of Americans think they are above average."
No. I'm saying that 49.99999999999999999999999999999% of all human beings on the planet are above average, and 80% of them are stupid as shit.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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