So money can buy happiness (to a point)?

It can buy lots and lots and lots of chocolate and TiVo storage. How you feel about it is your own business.

I feel that we are just a step or two away from social capital. help me over the leap.

bon bon's Bob Bob. Ok, I'll stop giggling now. Nice show.

This is like the joke about the elephant twins conjoined at the trunk, right? When one sneezes, the other one's head gets blown up real big?

Nope. It's shortcut in physics. When you are calculating where a theoretical dead horse would land (and its trajectory) if launched from a catapult with a certain force, you SHOULD incorporate surface area and friction and the medium through which it passes and a whole host of other minutae (sneezing butterflies, etc.) Really, you need a goddamned supercomputer and even then, it's pain in the ass. But when teaching the basic principles of acceleration and gravity and all that shit, you reduce it to a simple assumption to avoid making heads explode and start with just the basic concept: a spherical dead horse.

And why would you be launching a dead horse? Well, to get it over the castle/stronghold wall and infect the hoards you are trying to overtake. Preferably, the dead horse would have died from something nasty like anthrax or the plague , and if you do it just right, you can land it (*plop*SQUISH*BOOM*) in their water supply. (this is a fairly common backstory, but my prof's wife was a medieval english history scholar who did research on the side for romance novelists, and he helped her. So we got all sorts of extra trimmings.)

I brought it up because the philosophy assumptions reminded me that often to explore a theory, you start with some assumptions that aren't quite right. You build from there, going back periodically to revise your assumptions when they don't give you what you see reflected in reality.

And on that note, a funny rewrite in an adcouncil/girl scouts ad in the paper:

Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (resung by science)

Twinkle, twinkle little star
You're a ball of gas that's very far.
32 light years in the sky
10 parsecs which is really high
Helium carbon and hy-dro-gen
Fuse to make our starry friend.
When it enters supernova stage
It explodes with bursts of rays.
And if the star's mass is big and bold
It will become a black hole!

When my dad was in grad school, a buddy of his was a caricaturist and did one of my dapper dad in front of a telescope with a chick moonily looking up at him and the words "Twinkle twinkle little star...actually it's not a star, it's an asteroid."

While everyone is having intelligent thoughts about economics and theology, I...am not.

And apparently there was some LFN kerfuffle I missed at some point? Which, well? Huh?

Really? I didn't hear LFN kerfuffle. I heard SGA kerfuffle that's just a rehash of eight other stale kerfuffles.

Am I going to feel like a an idiot when someone tells me what LFN is?

Same here, but I was going on the assumption that "most" here: [redacted] is an average, and that if you got local, say to LA or NY, the number would be higher, and if you took it to Jamaica, it'd be lower

Sure. "Most" people in the world. Not each person.

La Femme Nikita.

La Femme Nikita.

ETA: Damn you, wee ita!

"Most" people in the world. Not each person.

1. World? You think it holds for all those country with a much lower cost of living than the US? So many places I could be living like a raucous king on $30K, relatively speaking.

2. I was talking locales that shift the averages, not individuals.

1. World? You think it holds for all those country with a much lower cost of living than the US? So many places I could be living like a raucous king on $30K, relatively speaking.

Wasn't that part of the point? It was in my head.

2. I was talking locales that shift the averages, not individuals.

Either way.