It doesn’t take much to understand what’s wrong with America today. There’s naturally going to be some crowding when three out of every four people make up 75% of the country’s population. But that’s just the begining of our problems!
Nearly 50% of the country struggles with below average intelligence and this certainly isn’t helped by the fact that a full half of us live at or below the average income level.
What’s worse is that even the intelligent students aren’t too intelligent. Not a single person, not one student in this great place we call America, managed to get in the 100th percentile on any standardized test in the last decade. Are we really struggling that much?
I think we just need to work smarter, not harder. I’m hesitant to point the finger at lackluster education but let’s face facts here. A full 40% of the time kids are missing school on a Monday or a Friday. This is simply unacceptable.
I mean, compare us to Japan. They get up anywhere between 13 and 16 hours before we do. That’s a can-do attitude. Is it any wonder why they’re dominating us in the global market?
But we can’t accept that. We can’t accept any way of life different from our own. Take minorities for example. No minority group makes up more than half our population and if we’re supposed to be a melting pot it’s high time this starts to change.
There’s too many problems and not enough time to address them all. Suffice it to say, I’m distraught.
I think we should begin with the schools. Pay teachers more money. That way, they would be wealthier, and having wealthier teachers might help kids learn. Also, instead of starting with kindergarten or 1st grade, start with 6th grade, and that’ll give American kids a leap of several years over the foreign kids.
I disagree, I feel that the problem lies with all those foreigners living abroad. Most countries in the world today are populated overwhelmingly with non-americans! In some places (I am looking at YOU, “France”), they make up entirely different words for common, everyday objects, such as hats, just to be sneaky.
Why should any one fail in school, or end up working in lower-income jobs? More generally, we need to ensure that there are no lower and middle economic classes. Everyone should be upper class.
What’s exceddling disturbing to me is that 100% of college dropouts do not have degrees, and will never get to do the cool “let’s toss our hats into the air” ritual.
And of those who never partaken in said ritual, only ONE of them is the richest man in the nation.
No, nearly 50% of the country struggles with intelligence below the median, not the average. The median is the value halfway between the lowest and highest; the average is the sum of all values divided by the number of values.
Only if we choose to accept errors as “corrections.”
The median is an average. Likewise, the arithmetic mean (which was identified in the above post as “the average”) is an average. In addition, one may compute the mode value, and publish it as the quite correct (although possibly misleading) average. Beyond which, if one chooses to be particularly arcane, one may calculate the geometric mean and still arrive at an average.
I am not sure where the notion that only an arithmetic mean may accept the nomenclature “average,” but that is neither correct math nor correct English. Average simply mean the single value that represents particular significance among a range of unequal values; it is not limited to the arithmetic mean.
You don’t know how right you are. Any other government will allow their citizens to use any word they want. If a new word is needed, every other country will borrow from whoever used the first word. The French have a whole thing that makes up new French words for new things.
The problem is not just in America. World hunger is brought about by everyone wanting to eat. If they didn’t want to eat, then they wouldn’t be hungry.
If someone could answer me this: If the French don’t speak english, how can they understand each other? How dare they french in France, and not english.
People, the real problem is that we’re trying the same old approaches. It’s time that we think outside the box if we’d like to tackle the real issues such as 100% of the unemployed not having jobs and uneducated cats. Go beyond the paradigm.
You are quite correct, but I think it is common usage to say ‘the average’ for the arithmetic mean, though this is not techncially correct.
Also, just about everything follows a normal distribution for which the mean and median (and mode) are about the same. So it’s likely, but not necessary, that ~50% of people are below average.
I apologise for inserting accurate information into this thread.
BTW did you know that over 40% of americans take DHMO regularly, often in common drinks such as coke or beer, and in fact have become completely depedent on it? I blame dihydrogen monoxide for your ills.
Whilst we’re arguing averages: I’d also bet that quite a lot more than 50% of the population are on less than the mean national wage.
Earnings is in fact the classic example of when it makes more sense to use the median than the mean precisely because of this problem.
Other than that, I merely note that GarayM used his post to make an exact same joke that had already been made in the OP. I’m a bastard like that and I do rather like people to at least read the OP, even if they can’t manage to cope with the thread.
