– A teenager spent most of the money in his bank account. Then, by doing nothing but letting the remaining balance sit there, he went from having $4.85 to owing $229.10, due to fees and penalties accrued within two weeks. I can’t imagine what sort of lesson to draw from this except further confirmation that banks’ policies are specifically intended to screw money out of the poor.
– “After studying and cataloging 522 texts, Boyd concluded that Genesis 1 can be classified as narrative with a probability of virtually one.” That’s adorable.
– For all the out-of-touch wackiness NaturalNews is usually crammed with, not all of their priorities are way out of line. While their ideas about a government fluoride conspiracy might be nothing but paranoia, their attitude to the TSA is unsettlingly in line with my own. A 17-year-old girl was recently detained and missed her flight because she was carrying a purse with a gun design on it.
– The folk at Age of Autism, on the other hand, are yet to display any such fortuitous stopped-clock correctness, to my knowledge. They’re still going on about Andrew Wakefield. Hey, did you know that you can take a study with a tiny sample size, which was fraudulently conducted, whose results have been refuted and never replicated in multiple studies, and which has been formally retracted by the journal that published it, but still have this study be “valid and scientifically sound” by simply declaring it so without making any effort to rebut the numerous criticisms? It works for anti-vaccinationists!
Ahem! It doesn’t happen just to teenagers. The very same thing happened to my husband last month! We complained and all the charges were removed, but still. Bad way to do business with someone who has been with the bank for over twenty years.
Wasn’t it you that posted the memory article not too long ago that said things only had to be repeated often enough for folks to believe it? Even if there was overwhelming evidence against it?
Go forth, and repeat!
You just reminded me of a Cracked article, which I’ve just added a link to. You’re right, it’s not like this is one outlier incident making an unfortunate impression, it’s pretty much how the system is designed to work.
I don’t remember that memory article specifically, but it sounds like the sort of thing I might say.