Whaaa….?

So… apparently, there are at least 2 people with nothing better to do with their time, and one of them is impersonating me – I’m complimented and touched. My blog has pretty much lying disused, and I had pretty much forgotten about it until I started receiving a barrage of comments today…. one of these kind commentors alerted me to some hilarious goings on at Dilip D’Souza’s site, which has made my morning, requiring to forgo my morning coffee – thanks guys you saved me $2.10 today. Actually, I’ll probably buy the coffee anyway.

Not that it will count for anything, but I have not been commenting on his site – and have pretty much been out of the ‘blogging scene’ for ages, except for the occasional rant here or there. I find myself mostly obsessed with Facebook these days, and for somebody with my level of bombast it is a lot more real-time than blogging.

But whoever has been commenting, I have to say, I am quite impressed at the amount of time on your hands, and like the Pakistani Government, I extend my diplomatic and moral support to your cause.

Initially, I was thinking of not publishing most of the comments left on my site (simply because it’s a chore), but it goes against my comment policy, so I am going publish them now. Anyway, I am going back to work, I really do have better things to do – so, my dear impersonator, thanks for driving traffic to my blog, but I don’t ake any money off it, and I don’t even really look at it myself. So feel free to mess with it. All I ask is don’t impersonate me while abusing Barkha Datt, lawsuits are painful.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Deesha dot org

Why statistics truly can be used to prove anything

Let’s suppose there is a country called UnequalStan.

In UnequalStan, there are 2 people –  Gareeb, who earns $1/day and Amir, who earns $100/day.

By the World Bank’s definition, Gareeb falls below the widely accepted ‘Poverty Line’ and therefore, you could say that 50% (or 1 out of 2 people) in UnequalStan are poor.

Now let’s suppose that UnequalStan’s population increases by 3. You now have 5 people in living in UnequalStan. The new additions are Gareeber, Amirer & Bill Gates.

Gareeber earns 50 cents (or $0.50) / day, where as the other two earn $100/ day as well. So, applying the definition of ‘Poor’ as explained above, UnequalStan looks like this:

Poor

• Gareeb
• Gareeber

Rich

• Amir
• Amirer
• Bill Gates

So kids, what is the change in poverty levels in UnequalStan? Is it:

1. A reduction of 10% (going from 1/2 to 2/5 or from 50% to 40%)?
2. An increase of 100% (because there was 1 person before, and now there are 2 )
3. Farmers are dying in Vidharba
4. Aishwarya Rai married a tree

Now since I am not a famed economist, and nobody calls me for conferences, my answer was 1 (although I was dying to answer 4 as well…)

However, apparently the correct answer is ‘2‘

From the above link, we can draw the following conclusions:

1. The author of said article has a huge bias against the Congress
2. The author is in favour state-sponsored murder
3. The author is in favour of women getting the shit kicked out of them for going to a pub
4. No matter how ‘intelligent’ somebody claims to be they are still human beings, subject to the regular human emotions, and capable of making an ass of themselves.

Why does everything have to be about poverty?

This

Lekhni wonders why ‘Indians’ hate Slumdog Millionnaire. I can’t speak about ‘Indians’, but I can speak about why I didn’t like it. There are 2 specific reasons: