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Johnny
"Do you recognize a difference between a dollar and a cent?"
"Of course."
"Do you recognize a difference between half a dollar and half a cent?"
"Yes."
"Ok, therefore, do you recognize a difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents?"
"...No. There's no such thing as .002 dollars!"
Yes, this is old, but you can hear the full transcript here, and check out the blog of the incident here.
3 comments:
I listened to the entire thing earlier this week. It's one of those things taht you have to hear to believe. Not only does one person not understand, 3 different people that the guy talks to don't understand. They even go to do the conversion on the calculator and you wonder how these people made it through high school. Who would ever want to do post secondary in the US? I guess that's why all the people who can't get into medicine here head down south, pay the big fees, and get their Med degree. God damn, people like that piss me off. Actually, the same goes for all professional schools and advanced degrees (PhD/MSc.) Not that I should talk...that could be me in a couple years. I'm just saying that is easier to get in down there...and I know one too many dumbasses who made it in to medical school down there to be able to stand it.
Anyway, I need to study.
I couldn't believe it either. It was as if they didn't fully understand the concept of decimal points. Basically, ANY dollar amount that was expressed in terms of 0.xx was denoted "cents". They didn't understand that 0.002 cents was equivalent to 0.00002 dollars. At one point, even the customer reversed this and said 0.002 dollars was equal to 0.00002 cents, but that was probably a stress-induced error.
I blame it on not only a lack of math education, but also on a lack of scientific education. If they had taken any real science classes, they would have learned all about units and unit conversions and thus wouldn't have assumed that just because something has a decimal point it means "cents". Fuck, ANY moderately intelligent junior high student would be able to understand this... I'm blown away.
I like how the people getting degrees in the "heavy" courses down here know very little in comparison to Canada. The attitude is alot different down here; people feel that they can fail a few classes, no problem, they'll just redo them and get their degree a semester or two later. Its the kind of attitude you develop when you have way too much money. I see poor kids coming from public ed that are slow, though getting great grades compared to the white kids who come from affluent families that are essentially buying the kid a degree. It is frustrating, especially when they comment on my degree in Jazz Studies being useless. I reply that I'm here to get the experience I need to have a career in the Jazz idiom, i.e. not just passing my classes, but MASTERING the material. Isn't that what higher education is about? The Degrees in the U.S. are handed out way too easily, and all it does is degrade the education standard, and they wonder why they have problems in the world? Frustating, as well, when people choose courses to boost their GPA, so their parents will continue to pay for their education. My proposal is to implement a curved tuition, that calculates the difficulty of the course by the distribution of grades in the class, multiplying by the credits the course is worth and what level the course is (100, 200, 300 etc), and then dividing the raw tuition by the persons' gpa and a coefficient determined by the University. The curve should like like a transformation of a negative square-root curve: Approaching 0 as the grade of the student rises. To make even more incentive, why not calculate GPA to a higher precision, and get rid of letter grades? Also, it would be quite unfair to normally distribute class grades with this system, so I think going back to a raw percent system would work quite well. Enough ranting. I need to sleep and get over this cold.
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