One, Two, Many, Lots
Jun. 5th, 2006 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forsythMy last post reminded me of something else. I finished reading The K Street Gang. It was a good summary of everything, although in the last chapter the writer switched back to trying to blame the corruption on "big government" and those gosh darn liberals who took power after Nixon and tried to regulate campaign money. But that's not what this is about. Two things struck me as I was reading it.
The first, the amounts of money. Oh, I'd seen the amounts mentioned elsewhere, and in other articles, but it didn't quite sink in. Words like "million" and "billion" get tossed around all the time, but the book got into things like the $19,000 a week hotel suite Abramoff's partner rented, the luxury cars, and the continuous amounts of money they got off people, and the chains of "non-profits" most of it got laundered through before finally ending up in their pockets. It's ridiculous. It didn't seem like the kind of thing that'd really happen, but I guess it did. And it's hard for most people to grasp the scale of things, because numbers on that magnitude are just numbers, they don't tie to anything we normally deal with. And when they're just written as $45 million", it gets mentally translated to "big". So I think newspapers should start writing out the whole number for things like that. $45,000,000 looks bigger than "$45 million." And $45,000,000,000 is visibly bigger than $45 billion, and easier to distinguish from "45 million.'
And the other thing that struck me was the excerpts from some of the emails that got sent around in high powered Washington lobbyist circles. They read like emails written by 14 year old AOLers. Spelling, and grammar and capitalization all optional, u instead of you, r instead of are, and way way way too many exclamation points. These were the kind of people who could bilk tribes out of millions of dollars and bribe Congresscritters into covering for little more than slavery? Man. I guess literacy isn't really valued that much, is it?
The first, the amounts of money. Oh, I'd seen the amounts mentioned elsewhere, and in other articles, but it didn't quite sink in. Words like "million" and "billion" get tossed around all the time, but the book got into things like the $19,000 a week hotel suite Abramoff's partner rented, the luxury cars, and the continuous amounts of money they got off people, and the chains of "non-profits" most of it got laundered through before finally ending up in their pockets. It's ridiculous. It didn't seem like the kind of thing that'd really happen, but I guess it did. And it's hard for most people to grasp the scale of things, because numbers on that magnitude are just numbers, they don't tie to anything we normally deal with. And when they're just written as $45 million", it gets mentally translated to "big". So I think newspapers should start writing out the whole number for things like that. $45,000,000 looks bigger than "$45 million." And $45,000,000,000 is visibly bigger than $45 billion, and easier to distinguish from "45 million.'
And the other thing that struck me was the excerpts from some of the emails that got sent around in high powered Washington lobbyist circles. They read like emails written by 14 year old AOLers. Spelling, and grammar and capitalization all optional, u instead of you, r instead of are, and way way way too many exclamation points. These were the kind of people who could bilk tribes out of millions of dollars and bribe Congresscritters into covering for little more than slavery? Man. I guess literacy isn't really valued that much, is it?
